The Devil's Dream

by Lee Smith

  I wrote “Shoes” because of something a girl said to me at the beauty shop one day while we were both in there getting our hair streaked, which takes forever. She said that her ex-husband had called up to ask her something about the kids, and then he just came right out and asked her if she’d been sleeping with other men. She said she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of an answer one way or the other, but wasn’t that awful? She said he thought that no one else could fill his shoes. It rang in my head when she said that, the way a song will. Well, we all talked about her situation that day in the beauty shop, and then about two days later I sat down and started writing.

  All you ever cared about was workin’ night and day,

  You didn’t want home or family gettin’ in your way,

  I’ll bet you’re at the office now, your feet all hurt and sore

  From some flimsy Italian shoes you paid too much for at the store.

  Well, you know I’ve got somebody else,

  And it ain’t real recent news,

  You still don’t seem to think anyone else

  Could ever fill your shoes.

  Due to the big success of “Shoes” we bought a farm out in Brentwood and moved everybody on out there, none too soon as it turned out, because Ralph’s daughter Shirley wanted to come up to live with us, too, since she hated this yoga instructor her mamma was with, and so of course we said yes. Then Ralph’s son James and his wife Susan and their little boy Ricky Lee moved up from Texas—James is a soundman—and so we built them a house out at the farm, next to Don and Rhonda’s. After I had the twins, we hired a full-time nanny named Ramona Smoot and converted the old tobacco barn into a house for her to live in. Ralph put in a pond so he could go fishing whenever he wanted. Then Don got interested in Arabian horses, so we had this special barn built and bought six of them. I admit I love to see them running around out in the field in front of the house looking pretty, but I wouldn’t ride a horse on a bet. They are too big.

  We got an interior decorator to come out and help us do over the house, and by the time he got done with it, it was just beautiful! They wrote it up in the Nashville Tennessean, in Nashville Homes, and even in Southern Living. The only thing Ralph said, before the decorator started in on it, was that he wanted one room just for him that would stay undecorated, and have a reclining chair and a big TV and a refrigerator in it, so that’s what he got!

  Ralph and me were both just as interested in our new bus, because in this business you’re on the road as much as you’re at home. So we had it customized to our specifications, with a little kitchen in the back where Ralph would whip up all kinds of things for me and the boys. It relaxed him. He used to like to drive the bus himself, too, though we had a driver to do it. Many’s the night I sat up in the front with Ralph, watching America roll by, and many’s the night I lay with him in our special-built king-size bunk in the back, feeling the distance pass under us all night long, falling asleep in one state and waking up in another. The first year we had that bus, we put 250,000 miles on it. Then we took a kind of a break from touring long enough for me to have the twins and record the Roots album, and then we were back on the road again. Lord! It seemed to me that our life was like that endless highway, only the older I got, the faster we seemed to be traveling along it. I wished I could slow things down. I wished I could go back and travel some of those miles over again.

  I remember saying something of the kind to Ralph one time, it was when I was pregnant with the twins. We were in bed on the bus, driving through the desert headed somewhere. I forget where we were going. I couldn’t sleep. I sat up just for a minute and pushed the blinds up to look out at the flat silver desert drifting by. Moonlight came in through the space in the blinds and lit up Ralph’s dear face.

  “Honey?” I said. “Honey?”

  “Hmmm?”

  I could tell he was nearly asleep. But the moonlight—or maybe just being pregnant, or something—had filled me with the most awful feeling, a feeling of time passing, of sorrow ahead. “Honey?” I said. “Will you love me when I’m old?”

  “What?”

  “When I’m old, Ralph. When you’re old. Will you love me then?” I was crying.

  “Katie-bird,” Ralph said very solemn, feeling of my stomach, “as God is my witness, I will love you when you’re old. I will love you till the end of the world,” he said.

  I felt better then. I tried to explain. “The thing that kills me is, I just wish we were both real young right now, honey, and had our whole lives ahead of us. I wish we were just starting out. I wish I could go back and meet you when I was eighteen, and live all those years with you. You know what I mean?”

  Good old Ralph. He’d bring me back down to earth every time. “But you can’t do it, sugar,” he said then. “It don’t work that way. The only way you can go is straight ahead, full-tilt boogie. There ain’t no other way.”

  So that’s the way we went, Ralph and me, and it was fine.

  But we didn’t get to grow old together.

  Ralph and his son James were both killed in a head-on collision outside Knoxville in a patch of the thick Tennessee River fog which that stretch of road is famous for. Ralph was driving the bus, and James was sitting up there keeping him company. I was sound asleep in the back. So were Mooney and Frosty, and the others were playing poker. I woke up at the moment of impact, when the semi truck ran into us with a crash so loud I thought it was a bomb dropping—this was the first thought that ran through my mind. But then we were going down the bank backward, and then we were rolling, and I was flung out through the window.

  I’m not sure how long I lay there passed out. When I came to, I was laying on my back in wet grass looking straight up at the sky, where oddly enough I could see stars—the brightest, prettiest stars—just for a minute before the drifting fog and smoke covered them up.

  You couldn’t breathe. You couldn’t see twenty feet in front of you. I was on a slant, and somehow I had a sense of the big river on down there below us, though I couldn’t see it. A lot of people were yelling, but I couldn’t see them either, only here and there a light or a flare through the fog, and then all of a sudden there came this tremendous explosion, this awful burst of flame which lit up the whole night, and I knew it was the bus, the bus blazing all over, end to end, I could see its outline in the flames.

  And now lots of people were yelling, there seemed to be more people, though I still couldn’t see them. I couldn’t see anything but the brilliant burning bus, and I have been seeing it ever since, it burns like that forever in my heart.

  Somehow I made my way over there closer to it, but they grabbed me and made me stay back. Nobody could get close to the bus. The heat was awful. By then there were sirens and blue lights everyplace, and somehow Mooney was there too, holding me back, but I kept screaming for Ralph and asking them, Has anybody seen Ralph? Has anybody seen Ralph? An awful, chemical smell was coming from the burning bus, that made everybody draw back and cough.

  I don’t know how much later it was when they got the fire out, more or less. By then I guess I was crazy. I broke free of Mooney and stumbled up to the bus, which you could see better now in the flares they had set all around. It lay on its side, the driver’s side, like a big terrible toy. “Ralph!” I was screaming. “Ralph!” I burned my feet and legs on the metal before they could catch me and pull me back.

  But I knew then.

  I stayed there for hours and hours. I refused to leave until they had gotten Ralph and James out, which was well into the day I know now, though I had lost all sense of time. It seemed like there were hundreds of people down there by then, maybe there were.

  When it got light you could see that the semi truck had gone all the way down in the river. Its driver, Sam Rasnake from Cookeville, Tennessee, drowned. People said it was a miracle that him, Ralph, and James were the only ones that died in such a collision, but it was not a miracle to me, it was a curse. I wished I had died, too. I stayed there until the crane came a
nd lifted the bus and they got them out and put them on stretchers, and then I went forward to see.

  I had to see.

  “Don’t let her go up there!” somebody was hollering, but it was too late. Ralph’s whole face was gone, he was bloody and black beyond knowing, and the smell was terrible. One arm hung down off the stretcher bed, and there was the hand I had held so many times, and there was the turquoise wedding band we had bought in Gatlinburg, just like this one I’m wearing.

  For some reason, I thought to get his ring. Crazy things will go through your mind at a time like that. I reached down for Ralph’s hand, but when I touched it, all the flesh came right off and stuck to mine. I started screaming then, and couldn’t stop.

  You don’t think you can live through a thing like that, but you do. You don’t have any idea what all you can live through until you have to. And me, I was supporting about fifteen people not counting my band, so I had to.

  I had to work.

  When you get right down to it, there’s not much in this life that we’ve got any choice about, is there? It is amazing what all a person can take, and still go on. I don’t know what I would have done without my family, or my fans.

  Little Virginia came over here for a while to help Don and Rhonda, and they handled everything—the funeral, which I cannot even remember, the burial out at the farm.

  I insisted on having Ralph buried by the pond, where he loved to fish, and where I can look out my bedroom window and see his grave. Of course now we’ve put in the memory garden all around the grave, so that makes it a very special place for me, and also it is nice for the children and for the fans. When the tour buses come in the turn-around, they always point out Ralph’s memory garden. It is nice to be remembered. It is nice to have a memorial.

  And I’ll tell you, not a single hour of a single day goes by that I don’t remember Ralph, and what a fine man he was, and how good he was to me. And fun? Lord! Ralph was fun, and a woman has got to have some fun in this life too, though many of us get precious little, it seems to me. I just wish every woman in the world could take a hit of what I had.

  I may sound like I’ve got it together now, but this is not true either. One thing I have learned through my experience is that you never do get it really together, and you might as well quit waiting for that particular day to come. You’ll die waiting to get it together. The best you can do is to keep on keeping on, and let the low side drag. I believe this.

  But it took me a long while to learn it. I was so bitter at first, and so confused, and made several bad decisions that could have wrecked my life still more if God had not stepped in, in the person of Billy Jack Reems.

  To go back to the accident itself, I had three broken ribs, a fractured bone in my ankle, lacerations on my face which required plastic surgery, and third-degree burns on my feet and legs. Mooney had a broken arm and a broken nose, the fiddle player had a broken collarbone, and Tommy was shook up but medically all right. Poor Frosty Duke got an injury to the spine that has made him gradually lose control of the whole right side of his body. This is heartbreaking to see, as it has made him give up music altogether. Now he runs a catfish farm in north Alabama, which is as good as anything else to do I reckon, if you get to where you can’t perform.

  God forbid I should ever get to that point, as it has become more and more my life, and especially since the accident. It was all I had left, so I threw myself into my work, bought a new bus, and Mooney helped me get a new band together of mostly young Texas boys.

  I was neglecting my little twins, back home with Ramona and the rest of the family, they didn’t even hardly know me. All I did was work. I was much more comfortable on the bus than I was at home.

  I had a lot of men during this period of my life, because I was so angry, I know now, but none of them meant a thing to me. I needed somebody there with me in the dark, but as far as I was concerned, there was one side of the bed that would always stay empty. Right about then is when I wrote “What Happened to the Good in the Good Old Boys?” and “Single Girl.”

  It don’t take a genius to figure out where those came from!

  It was during the session when we were cutting “Single Girl” that Mooney took me aside by the elbow and said he thought I ought to lay off the rum and Coke until we got it down on wax.

  “Just what do you mean, ‘lay off’?” I got real mad at Mooney and made a little scene, which got blown up out of all proportion in the papers, of course, everything always does.

  But it was not a month later that I wrecked my car on the way home from a party at a politician’s house—I’m sure you know who, that made the papers, too—and ended up in Vanderbilt Hospital again, this time with a DWI and charges pending.

  I agreed to go into a twenty-eight-day rehab program only after RCA made it clear that I had to. But I was mad as fire and would not participate in any of those dumb group things. I sat in my room and bided my time, thinking about Ralph Handy. I guess I still couldn’t believe that there wasn’t some way I could get Ralph Handy back, you see I had had my own way for so long. I was spoiled. I’d worked hard, but I had gotten everything I ever wanted. Ralph Handy was the first thing I’d ever wanted that I purely couldn’t have, that had been taken away from me forever. He was the only thing I’d ever really wanted, the only man I’d ever loved.

  Well, I was sitting in my room one day feeling sorry for myself and refusing to go to a group, when in pops the littlest preacher you ever saw. He put his umbrella down (it was early spring, and raining) and said, “Whew! What a downpour!” I got tickled at the way he talked, like a man in a cartoon. He pulled up a chair near the window where I was sitting and said, “Now. My name is Billy Jack Reems.” He looked at me good. “You can go ahead and cry now,” he said, which I did, literally buckets of tears, all those tears I’d held back because I’d been too busy working and drinking and messing around to cry. It was the first time I’d cried since I buried Ralph. I couldn’t stop, either. I screamed and pulled on my hair.

  When I wore out some, he held a big old-fashioned handker-chief out to me. “Blow your nose,” he said.

  “You act like I’m a child,” I said.

  “We are all children of God,” he said, “and God loves us every one.”

  Naturally this made me furious. “If that’s true, how come He treats us so bad? How come He would kill Ralph Handy for no reason at all? How come He would make me suffer like this?”

  “He doesn’t like to see you suffer, Katie,” Billy Jack said. “Your pain is His holy pain, and He will bear it all for you. He will take it all away from you right now if you will let Him.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Pardon my French.”

  Billy Jack smiled at me like an angel. “I’ll pardon your French, honey, and the Lord God who loves you will pardon your soul. As well as lift your pain, if you will only hand it over to Him.”

  I stared at him sitting in that orange Naugahyde chair. His feet didn’t even touch the ground.

  “Let go and let God,” he said mysteriously.

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “Well, just exactly how am I supposed to do that?”

  “I’ll help you,” said Billy Jack Reems, and even though he was about as big as a Barbie doll, I believed him. There was something about him that made me believe him. Rhonda’s opinion was that I was just ready to believe anybody at that point, but she took it all back after she met Billy Jack, and now she’s a Minister of Care. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Just then the nurse came in, and her face turned dark as a thundercloud when she saw who was in the room with me. “Mr. Reems!” she said. “You know you’re not supposed to be in here! We’ve run you out of this unit before! This is a private hospital,” she said severely, and shoved him out of the room, but not before he had handed me his card. It read:BILLY JACK REEMS

  CHILD OF GOD

  HALLELUJAH CONGREGATION

  “I don’t know how he keeps getting in here,” the nurse said as she left.
r />   In the bottom right-hand corner of the card there were three telephone numbers, only one of them not crossed out.

  When I got out of my twenty-eight-day rehab, I called that number.

  Now I can understand that I was starving for God’s love, that I had been denying that part of myself ever since I was a child, ever since I’d been cut off somehow from the love of God at the church on Chicken Rise. I’d cut myself off, to be exact—out of arrogance, out of pride, out of not wanting to be like my mamma. Anyway, I called the number, and I went to my first Hallelujah Congregation meeting without any particular hope, simply to have something to do on a Sunday morning, which used to be kind of a special time for me and Ralph, he would cook us a real big breakfast. You can just imagine.

  Well, I went. The Hallelujah Congregation was meeting then in the YMCA on Hillside Drive, and as soon as I walked in, I knew it would be a joke. I had gotten dressed up like a person would normally dress up for church. But the other people had on every kind of thing you can imagine—blue jeans, shorts, overalls, work clothes, you name it! They were sitting in a circle of folding chairs. No sooner did I sit down than Billy Jack—for he was in the center of the circle—asked us all to hold hands.

  Now this is the kind of stuff I just hate, and particularly with women. I don’t believe I had held hands with a woman since I was a little girl playing Pretty Girl Station with Rose Annie and Georgia. I had never seen any reason to hold hands with a woman. But now I had gone and gotten myself in a situation where I had to hold hands, and I had a woman on either side of me, and one of them a Negro! Plus I had just recently learned that my nanny Ramona Smoot was one of those, when she asked if she could let her “friend” move in out at the farm and, to my surprise, this friend turned out to be a woman that Ramona Smoot went around holding hands with in public, in spite of being English! So you can understand how I felt about holding hands.

  But somehow it wasn’t too bad. I held hands with this little bitty dried-up woman on my right side and with the big heavy black woman on my left side, while we all sang “You Gotta Love One Another Right Now,” and when we were done, the black woman reached over and hugged me, squeezing me into her huge soft bosom like I was a little baby. My own mamma had never hugged me at all, you know, and here I was, over forty years old before I realized how needy I was.