by Lee Smith
“Yes, ma’am. Absolutely,” the lady doctor said.
I started crying. I believe I had known this, too.
“Well, what do you want to do about it? Do you wish to abort?” she asked. She had a northern voice but she sounded kind.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t,” for in that moment it seemed to me like something had to come out of all this, all this pain and craziness which had been my life with Wayne Ricketts.
For a minute she put her hand, cool and smooth, on my forehead. She stroked my hair. “I’ll be back,” she said. “I will urge you to reconsider. It’s time you thought about yourself, I believe, Miss Cocker.”
So I lay there for a while, and then all of a sudden, the truth came to me. Katie, I heard a voice as clear as a bell. Katie, sit up. So I sat up. I looked around but nobody was in my room except my roommates sleeping their drugged sleep. The sun was coming up outside. Katie Cocker, I heard. I could tell it was a voice from home, from up on Grassy Branch. It sounded something like Little Virginia, a woman’s voice, but it was not anybody I knew. It was a voice I had not ever heard before, yet it was as familiar to me as my own. Maybe it was my own, in some crazy way which is past understanding. I listened for more. Katie, girl, I heard. You can either lay in this bed for the rest of your life, or you can get up and make something of yourself. It’s up to you. You’ve got some more singing to do. Get up.
So I got up. I got out of there. Of course it took me a little while. I had to convince the lady doctor that I was not going to have an abortion, and I had to convince everybody else that I was all right. I reckon I had been so far gone that this took some real effort on my part! But finally they let me go, and Don came and got me, driving the Merita truck. It smelled so good in there, he had just picked up the bread for his route.
When I got back to the house, everybody had something to show me. Annie May showed me a picture she had drawn of a horse, and I have to say it was real good. It was wearing a crown hat. “He is the king of all the horses,” Annie May said. “His queen is named Judy.” Annie May showed me some more horses she’d drawn, and then a bunch of drawings of houses with smoke coming out of the chimney, and I started crying. I was still weak from the hospital, and still taking tranquilizers. Rhonda brought out some of Annie May’s writing, too. It was just as even and pretty as could be.
“She’s smart as a whip,” Rhonda said proudly. “And now sit down, honey”—meaning me—“I’ve got something to show you, too.”
“You mean you ain’t showed her yet?” Don said, standing in the doorway.
“I’m fixing to,” Rhonda said, and Don started chuckling.
“I can’t imagine what you all are up to,” I said.
“That’s right, honey, you can’t!” Rhonda said, and then she came over and laid several Enquirers and magazines and such as that in my lap, and sure enough, there was Rose Annie and Johnny, big as life. “The King and Queen of Country Music,” it said.
“I bet you could of gone to the wedding,” Rhonda said, “if you would of told anybody where you was at.”
I read the articles again and again, I just couldn’t get over it, me in a hospital in Shreveport while Rose Annie and Johnny turned into the King and Queen of Country Music! Rose Annie looked so pretty in the pictures, lots prettier than she had looked the last time I was home. I started thinking back on all the time her and Johnny had spent together as children up on Grassy Branch. Now they were saying they’d been “childhood sweethearts.” I couldn’t get over it. Everybody that ever knew Johnny Rainette knew he had a screw loose someplace. I always figured he’d gone off and got in the army or else in trouble—for sure I’d figured that, like me, he was long gone from Grassy Branch. And I swear I’d never connected him with Blackjack Johnny Raines, whose songs I had heard on the radio, of course. “Five-Card Stud” is considered a standard.
“Well, what do you think?” Rhonda stood over me grinning like crazy.
“Lord, I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t hardly take it all in,” which was true. I sat there looking at the clippings and playing paper dolls with Annie May while Don went back out on his route and Rhonda made a German chocolate cake.
After that, me and Rhonda saved all the clippings about them that we could find, for I kept thinking that as soon as I had my baby and got back on my feet a little bit, I’d call Rose Annie up. I knew she’d be glad to hear from me. I wasn’t too anxious to see Johnny again, to tell the truth, because of this one time I remembered when he tried to come on to me when we were kids, and I slapped him good for it. But it was so long ago, maybe he had forgotten the whole thing. I certainly hoped so. I certainly hoped Rose Annie was as happy as she looked. She was the only person in my family I could imagine calling up at that point. Of course I realized that if Wayne Ricketts had not been in prison, he’d of had us up in Nashville in a New York second, to “take advantage of the situation,” as he’d say. I could just hear him saying it! But I wasn’t going to do that.
I was real big by then, and I needed to have this baby before I even thought about what to do after that. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to go back into music, anyway. I really liked the job that Don had helped me get, keeping accounts at Merita, and they’d said I could continue to work at home when the baby came. This part of me was thinking, Why keep knocking yourself out? Why kill yourself?
But another part of me was still writing songs, staying up late at night to do it, picking them out on my little old Gibson guitar.
This is what I was doing the night my water burst, in fact, and made the biggest mess in Rhonda and Don’s TV room. “Listen, don’t you touch that mess, I’ll clean it up as soon as I get back,” is the last thing I remember saying to Rhonda as they wheeled me into the delivery room, for the baby had started coming so fast.
“Forget it,” Rhonda said. “You just go in there and have your baby, and don’t worry about a thing.”
This time the baby came easy, as second babies often do. It was a seven-pound, six-ounce girl, just as bald as she could be, but real pretty in the face. I had hoped she would have her daddy’s green eyes, but hers were big and china blue like mine.
The saddest thing is that Wayne Ricketts didn’t even know she’d been born, because late that same night he was killed by another inmate at the prison, stabbed repeatedly in the chest with a six-inch knife. The argument was over a poker game, and I privately have always been sure that Wayne was cheating, knowing him as I did. Rhonda did not comment on this one way or the other, but his death was harder on her than it was on me, I’ll tell you.
It may sound awful to say it, but I’ve been through so much that I just say what I want to now, and the truth is, Wayne’s death let me off the hook. I knew I didn’t want him back when he made parole, but I hadn’t gotten around to telling Rhonda that because I knew it would just kill her, and now I’d never have to tell her. Now she could make believe whatever good things she wanted to about Wayne. She could change him all around in her mind, and turn him into something better than he was. Rhonda grieved hard, let me tell you! Even Don was surprised. It was like Wayne’s death had caused a dam to break. Rhonda would cry nonstop, then she’d talk nonstop. She went on for a week or more, and liked to wore us both out, especially me with a new baby. I learned things about the Ricketts that I’d never heard before, such as their daddy went out for a pack of Camels one day when Wayne was three and never came back, and their mother killed herself. Blew her head off with a shotgun, and Wayne was the one who found her with her brains all over the kitchen floor. And now Rhonda was the only one left.
No wonder she was so crazy about Annie May. No wonder she and Don got so excited about the new baby, who I named Louisiana. Louisiana Cocker.
Little Lou was only seven months old when I got a personal call at the office from Miss Dawn Chapel at BMI. She said she had had the hardest time getting my number. She said that “Call Me Back When You’ve Got Time” had been her all-time favorite record ever. And then she asked did
I just by chance have any other tunes that they might look at. She said she was getting an album together. I couldn’t believe it—there I was, in the Merita Bread office, talking to Dawn Chapel! I didn’t even have to struggle with my answer. All my good intentions of staying out of music flew right straight out the window, just like the Little Moron’s alarm clock.
“Yes ma’am, I sure do,” I said.
“Honey, when you get to be my age,” Dawn Chapel said, “you just purely hate it when anybody calls you ma’am. My name is Dawn,” she said.
“Well, sure, Dawn,” my voice came out real chipper and professional from someplace deep inside me, “I sure do appreciate your interest, and I’ll get a tape to you right away. I hope you’ll like at least one of the tunes.”
The song which Dawn Chapel put on her album was “Two Lefts Don’t Make a Right,” which nobody has ever heard of although that album went gold. I didn’t much like her version of the song myself. But selling a song to Dawn Chapel gave me the nerve to start singing in public again, with some of the boys from our old band backing me up, and before long I took it in my head to move to Nashville.
I will never forget the moment I decided it. It was real late and I was driving back alone from some juke joint or other where I’d been singing; I was smoking a cigarette and drinking a long-neck beer and enjoying the feel of the night, when all of a sudden it just popped into my head that I was going to Nashville, that I’d been headed for Nashville all my life, only I’d got sidetracked by first one thing and then another.
Now it was time to get a move on.
There’s some things you can’t do later.
The next night after supper, I told Rhonda and Don. Rhonda just looked at me for a minute with her chins shaking, and then she looked at Don, and then she said, “Well, when are we going to move?”
I jumped up and hugged her, and hugged Don, who said he could live anyplace and drive a truck, he reckoned, but he wouldn’t have no little baby girls anyplace else to drive him crazy. Then Rhonda went in the kitchen and made us another pot of coffee and we sat down and planned our strategy. I would go on up to Nashville by myself, and look for work, and find us a place to live, and then Rhonda and Don would come up bringing the girls.
When I told the boys in the band that I’d be leaving, I was surprised at how choked up I got, and how emotional they got, too. Everybody hugged me, and I told them all to look me up if they ever came up there, which was not likely, I knew, as they were all family men with day jobs in Shreveport.
Ralph Handy was the hardest one for me to say good-bye to. He pulled me to him so hard that I knew his bolo tie clasp was making a bruise on my neck, then he held me back out at arm’s length to look at me, then he hugged me again.
“Just keep it country,” he said.
I left soon after, driving a blue Dodge that I had bought cheap from Emory Marlowe’s mother-in-law, packed to the top with everything I owned in the world. It was so hard for me to say good-bye to Annie May and Louisiana. But as things turned out, it was nearabout a year before I could get established to where Rhonda and Don could bring the girls up to Nashville, and by then, it wasn’t only Annie May and little Louisiana that they brought.
They brought Wayne Ricketts’s son Tommy, too.
The first that any of us ever heard of Tommy was about six months after Wayne’s death, when a tacky redheaded woman from New Orleans came knocking on Rhonda and Don’s door in Shreveport, hauling a mean-looking kid along. Rhonda said that the kid’s lip was stuck out a mile, and he wouldn’t look you in the face. The woman was obviously a whore, according to Rhonda, who claims to be able to spot this instantly. She calls it a “hoor.” But the woman in question, Wayne Ricketts’s legal married wife as it turned out, claimed to be an exotic dancer, an artiste is what she said, who called herself the Fabulous Flame Woman and did some kind of an artistic fire dance. Her name was Suzanne Claudette Jones Ricketts.
“But you can call me Felice,” she told Rhonda. She said Felice was her professional name.
“What’s your professional last name?” Rhonda asked, trying to be friendly, you know, and the woman looked at her like she was crazy.
“I don’t have a professional last name,” she said.
Since they had about exhausted that subject and it was fixing to rain, Rhonda said, “Well, you’d better come on in, then,” and they did, and she gave them some pound cake right out of the oven, made from scratch. Felice ate one bite and then burst into tears, green eye makeup running down her cheeks like the River Nile. She had loved Wayne, she told Rhonda, she had lived with him in sin against her church (she was a Catholic, she said, which made Rhonda wonder what the Church thought of her profession, but of course Rhonda didn’t ask, not with Felice there crying buckets of green tears in the TV room), then married him, then had little Tommy (little Tommy was just about six feet tall already, at thirteen), and then you could have knocked Felice over with a feather when Wayne went out one day to get a haircut and never came back home. “Of course people disappear all the time in New Orleans,” Felice said, “but still.”
Rhonda said she just couldn’t say a word at that point. All she could think of was their own father and what he’d done. She said she got the spookiest feeling there for just a minute, as the thunder boomed and the rain fell in sheets outside. Then Tommy, who had not said one word up to that point, asked if he could have some more pound cake, and Rhonda said, “Sure you can, honey,” realizing in that moment that Tommy was hers now, that Felice had brought him there to stay.
Sure enough. It took all afternoon to get to it, but Felice had read in the Times-Picayune about Wayne’s murder in the penitentiary, and had been real sad about it, and meant to go down there and find out all she could from the records, as she knew Wayne had a sister (Rhonda) living someplace, but somehow she had never gotten around to it, not until just lately, when suddenly beyond her wildest dreams she had become engaged to a pilot at American Airlines, and frankly she’d really like to be able to start her new life out from under a cloud, and so she had thought that maybe Rhonda and Don would like for Tommy to come for a visit, just to get to know him, while she and her pilot husband honeymooned in the islands and they started their new life.
“What islands?” Rhonda said.
But then all of a sudden Tommy said “Shit” and rushed into the kitchen, where he started to play with a knife in a dangerous way. Rhonda went in and took it away from him, and marched him back into the living room with his arm twisted behind his back. When Rhonda wants you to do something, you do it. Rhonda is six feet tall and weighs two hundred fifty pounds.
“Tommy and me will be just fine, won’t we?” she said, twisting Tommy’s arm until he nodded and gritted his teeth. “You go right on, I think the rain has about quit now,” Rhonda said to Felice, who took this opportunity to get out while the getting was good.
Later, Rhonda and Don would find out about the shoplifting and the other things. Right then, the main point seemed to be that Felice wanted to get him out of her pretty red hair. Then Don came in. He took Tommy out in the backyard and pointed at the old Chevrolet resting there with the weeds growing up around it. “You want to help me tune that thing up?” Don asked him. “Then I’ll teach you how to drive.”
When Tommy turned back around to look at Don and see if he really meant it, he had tears in his green eyes.
5
Knocking on Doors
I’m not going to tell the next part of this story in too much detail, because this here is where my story gets to be just like everybody else’s. There’s a whole lot of knocking on doors up and down 17th Avenue, a lot of following up leads that go noplace, a lot of living on one meal a day at Linebaugh’s, a lot of people that run out on you. There’s a lot of nursing beers at the Exit-Inn, hoping you’ll meet somebody important. And then there’s always a producer who listens to your demo and takes you out to dinner and tells you how much he can do for you and then takes you out on his houseboat
at Percy Priest Lake for the weekend and tells you some more about what he can do for you, and gives you a margarita.
I know all about that.
I’ve been out to Percy Priest Lake.
Any woman who makes it in this business has been out there, no matter how sweet and down-home and pure as the driven snow she comes off sounding in an interview ten years later. She’s been out there, too. She’s had that margarita. She’s had several. But finally she’s figured out that this don’t help much. Nothing is going to happen overnight, in spite of what you read. Finally it’s all a combination of good luck and good timing, not talent, not looks.
This town is full of pretty girls that can sing their hearts out, it’s full of country boys with a great song written down in pencil on a sheet of notebook paper folded up real little in their back pocket. Most of those pretty girls will go back to singing in their own hometowns eventually, and then they’ll get married. They’ll sing in church. Most of those boys will go back home, too, and get a job doing something else, and sing on the weekends for a while with some old boys they went to high school with, and then they’ll quit, too. They’ll think about Nashville some over the years, about the time they spent here, they’ll make it out in their minds to be better than it was.
Because it was not fun, mostly. It was hard, hard.
The first thing you do, of course, is call up whoever you know, but when I tried to call Rose Annie I got a recording that said, This number is no longer in service at this time. I was sure it was the right number—I had written ahead to Rose Annie and she’d written back on the nicest notepaper with a color picture of their home on the front. So I kept trying from a pay phone, and getting that recording.
I was staying then in a room at the Parthenon Tourist downtown, right across from the park. When I went out to get some supper, I passed a rack of newspapers and saw immediately why I couldn’t get Rose Annie on the phone. “BLACKJACK JOHNNY SHOT BY WIFE” pretty much said it all. I bought a couple of newspapers and a couple of beers and some nabs and went back to my room and read all about it. It was just tragic for Rose Annie, to have left Buddy Rush for him and have it turn out this way. I was sure he’d deserved shooting, since she’d shot him. I never thought otherwise. As I was reading, it occurred to me that Johnny Raines had been just waiting for that bullet his whole life long. I can’t tell you exactly what I mean by that, but I know it is so. There’s some men that are born to be killed. Johnny Raines was one and Wayne Ricketts was another, and every minute they’re alive is borrowed time. Right then, in that dark back room at the Parthenon Tourist, I started writing my song “Borrowed Time.”