The Devil's Dream

by Lee Smith

  “The Pickin Parlor is just around here past the fireplace,” the boy says. “I promise.”

  They make another turn and pass the enormous fireplace, big enough for a man to walk into, its blazing fire tended by elves, and then there they are at the Pickin Parlor, where Katie Cocker is waiting with Carole Bliss and some people from RCA. Katie jumps up and runs to meet them. “Oh, Mamma Tampa,” she says, kneeling and taking her hand, “Mamma Tampa, I’m so glad you’re here!”

  “We’ve been on the road fer three days,” Mamma Tampa announces. “Our radiator busted,” which of course is a flat-out lie, RCA flew them over here in a private plane and had a driver pick them up. “It’ll be hell to pay,” Mamma Tampa starts muttering darkly, mysteriously, twisting her hands.

  “Well, what do you think of the hotel?” Katie asks brightly; real loud. Katie believes that the louder she speaks, the better Mamma Tampa will be able to understand what’s going on. This is not true. Since Mamma Tampa keeps muttering and twisting her hands, Katie asks Little Virginia, “What does Mamma Tampa think of the hotel?” but Little Virginia is breathing too hard to answer.

  “Hard to say,” Homer Onslow finally says, which seems to settle it.

  “Why, where’s R.C.?” Katie asks then, noticing his absence for the first time.

  “Wouldn’t come,” Homer says. “Couldn’t get him to come. Went out in the barn and locked the door behind him.”

  “Wait a minute,” one of the boys says. “This isn’t R.C. Bailey?”

  “Nosir,” Homer says, “this here’s Homer Onslow, small-engine repair,” and shakes his hand. It is the soft white hand of a boy who has never worked a day in his life.

  “Well, here’s Mamma!” Katie comes around to hug Alice. It might be just her imagination, but it seems to Katie that her mother has actually grown smaller, shrunk by about three or four inches, really she’s just this old tiny dried-up husk of a thing now, something like a cricket, too little to do any damage, too insignificant to make anybody miserable.

  “Oh, Katie,” Alice says. It seems to be all she can say. But she came, she’s here—wearing all black, like she’s going to a funeral, but still she came. Katie hugs her mamma tight for a minute. Maybe Alice did the best she could, considering. Maybe we all do.

  “Now I’ve got somebody I want you all to meet,” Katie says, leading them up onto the porch of the Pickin Parlor. “This here’s my daughter Annie May Hart and her husband Donnie, and looky here, this is my first grandbaby! This is little June. June, say hello to your great-grandmother, Alice Cocker!”

  June doesn’t say anything. She’s not but two months old.

  Alice can’t believe it. She has to sit down right there in a rocking chair on the porch of the Pickin Parlor and fan herself with one of the fans they have thoughtfully provided, those old funeral fans like the kind they used to have in the church on Chicken Rise. Now here they all are at the Opryland Hotel and they’ve got these same kind of fans, don’t it beat all? Same kind of rocking chairs, too, just like the ones on the porch at R.C . and Lucie’s house, only those really are old, and these are just made to look old. It’s hard to tell the difference.

  “Grandma? Grandma?” Annie May is saying. “Don’t you want to hold June?”

  But Alice never liked babies. “No,” she says, looking away, drawing up her face till she looks like a dried-apple doll. Annie May has got herself all fixed up like a huzzy instead of a mother, you’d think a cripple girl would know better, and her so-called husband has got on bell-bottom britches with silver-toed boots. Not to mention Alice’s own daughter Katie, who is dressed like a hoor. Alice knew she should have stayed home. The way it is, they’re going to miss church tomorrow, church which is the only thing Alice loves in the world anyway, fergit babies, fergit all that breathing and groping and rolling around in the dark, ain’t no man alive that can hold a candle to God. A strolling trio of English-looking men in stovepipe hats comes by, singing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” which is not even a Christmas song, in Alice’s opinion. The Christmas songs she likes are the old hard high songs like “Wondrous Love.” What wondrous love is this, oh my soul! oh my soul! On Chicken Rise you can see your breath in the frosty air as you sing, see the actual shapes of the words in the air like souls rising up to God.

  “Honey, don’t cry,” Donnie Hart is saying to his wife.

  “Get me one of them blue drinks with a little umbreller in it, and make it snappy,” Tampa says to her RCA boy, handling him a quarter. But Katie has ordered coffee and cookies all around, brought by waitresses in black fishnet stockings and little aprons who are obviously hoors, while Carole Bliss talks into her walkie-talkie and taps her foot and curses the day she ever had this big idea.

  When Rose Annie arrives, escorted by two good-looking state marshals and her daughter Sugar, for a minute nobody recognizes her. The little group stops dead still in the midst of the holiday throng moving past the porch of the Pickin Parlor, where they all sit, until Little Virginia shrieks out, “Why, Lord, it’s Sugar!” because they haven’t hardly seen Sugar in the last few years while she’s been off getting her Ph.D. in deconstruction at Duke University. Sugar may well be the only Ph.D. in the world named Sugar. When Sugar starts smiling and reaching out across the rail, Katie bursts into tears, she can’t hardly stand it. Rose Annie has gotten old all of a sudden, the way women will at their age who don’t take care of themselves, with wispy gray hair hanging down in her face, hunched shoulders, veiny blue hands sticking out the sleeves of her old coat. Katie wonders where Rose Annie could have possibly gotten that awful coat. Rose Annie will be up for parole next year but she might have to live in a rest home, this is what they’ve told Sugar, as she suffers from depression. Her spirit has been broken, as you can see. Still, the loveliest smile comes over Rose Annie’s face as she recognizes Katie, and her beautiful eyes, still cornflower blue, are perfectly clear, a girl’s eyes in an old woman’s face.

  What a reunion!

  Flash bulbs go off like fireworks. Even Little Virginia is crying, and tough old Homer Onslow wipes a tear from his eyes.

  “Well, set down!” Tampa orders. “It’s a real nice night. Looky here, you can see the Big Dipper.” Everybody starts laughing and the waitresses bring more coffee. Carole Bliss is just beside herself, looking at her watch, tapping her foot. “Time is money,” she says.

  Then Katie pokes her, pointing past the Merry Gentlemen, and here comes Virgie strolling along like she’s got all the time in the world, accompanied by hippies. Virgie has gone all-out for this occasion, wearing a glittery gold western-style dress with a long skirt, gold boots, and a cascading black wig. She starts waving like crazy as soon as she sees them on the porch, and everybody waves back.

  “Where the hell have you been? Dinner’s waiting on you,” Tampa says severely. “The men have already eat.”

  “Virgie, you look just terrific!” Katie hugs Virgie, who submits to this gingerly; she just spent forty minutes up in her room working on herself.

  “Now I’ve been thinking about the lineup,” Virgie tells Katie right off, taking a little notebook out of her purse.

  Katie looks at Virgie good. Under the fake black eyelashes, Virgie’s eyes are as bright as ever. She doesn’t look senile or demented either one, and Katie wonders if it is just remotely possible that Georgia put her in the rest home so she wouldn’t embarrass her and her big-shot husband.

  “Don’t sit down!” Carole Bliss directs Virgie’s group. “This way, everybody! They’re waiting for us.” Carole Bliss’s walkie-talkie crackles smartly as she leads them around the corner at exactly the moment when R.C., in the barn up on Grassy Branch, puts the barrel of his rifle in his mouth and sets the needle over on “Melungeon Man” one more time. R.C. has been thinking about his mamma, whose love for the Melungeon marked his life and made him a man always outside the closed door, waiting there forever in the outer dark. Then R.C. thinks of the night he and his Lucie, lovely Lucie, spent at that fancy hote
l in Cana so long ago, how they took a bath in the big white bathtub with claw feet, how Lucie giggled.

  There is a little wait before the fireplace while the driver brings the bus around, it went to the other entrance apparently. The elves are delighted, handing out Christmas candy.

  “Jawbreakers,” Tampa calls them.

  “Mamma Tampa, doesn’t this remind you of how you all used to tell stories around the fire of a night in the wintertime?” Katie asks.

  “Lord yes, honey, it sure does,” Mamma Tampa starts up. “I don’t know if you’ve ever heerd the one about the fiddling woman and the preacherman, but it was always one of my favorites. And it’s a true one, too! Took place over on Lone Bald Mountain, now that is about the lonesomest place you ever saw. They is a little cabin over there to this day, all over-growed by big dark cedar trees, where it happened. You can still hear that ghostly fiddle music playing out in the dead of night. It’ll chill your bones, I’ll tell you. It’ll put the fear of God in you.”

  “What happened?” asks one hippie girl, edging closer. Even the elves are listening.

  “They was an old preacherman that lived in that cabin, and somehow, whether by hook or cook or the will of God, he convinced a beautiful young fiddle-playing woman to marry him and come over there to live. She just loved him, it is said, against all reason or common sense, and bore him three babies right away,” Tampa says.

  Virgie is not one bit interested in these old stories. “What’s your name, honey?” she asks one of the marshals. Virgie has always liked a man in a uniform.

  “Eddie Ray Cox,” he says.

  Rose Annie likes to look into the fire, she’s always loved a fire, she laid out in the cold dark field one night looking back at a fire and all the people dancing in the fiery light, and Johnny was there too and she looked up past his head at the starry sky. “Come on, Rose Annie.” Katie pulls gently at her arm. “The bus is here,” which is all Katie ever sees in any fire, that burning bus. Katie leads Rose Annie past a tower of poinsettias. Katie wanted to plant burning bushes behind the benches in Ralph’s memory garden, like Lucie grew by the gate up home, but the landscape designer said he didn’t know what a burning bush was, he’d never heard of a burning bush which Lucie grew by the gate of the house up on Grassy Branch, where even now R.C. is dying. After they make this album, after a decent length of time has gone by to mark R.C.’s passing, Little Virginia and Homer will decide to go along with Gladys and Tammy’s idea of opening up the barn to the general public, filling it with old family pictures and clothes and furniture. Little Virginia has been dying to clean out that old house, anyway.

  “So he cracked that fiddle up against one of them cedar trees and forbid her to fiddle ever again, or to learn it to the younguns. And then he taken his walking stick to the younguns, one by one,” Tampa goes on.

  “Well, why don’t you hand that baby on over here after all?” Alice says to Annie May right out of the blue.

  “Eddie Ray, I believe I could use a hand here.” Virgie follows them onto the bus.

  “But the eldest boy would have none of it, he grabbed the stick away from the old preacherman and whacked him on the head with it, knocking his own daddy down in the dirt, and then ran off through the woods hollering that he would not be back, that he would never darken that door again.”

  “Come on now,” Carole Bliss says. “Let’s get her in the bus.” The RCA boys and the other marshal lift the wheelchair.

  “He ran like the wind through piney woods and laurel slicks, he ran acrost the rocky top of Lone Bald Mountain itself in the pitch-black dark, but in his awful haste he ran right over a clift, and that was the end of him. . . .” The last thing you hear as they shut the door is Mamma Tampa, telling her old crazy stories one more time.

  Notes

  I would like to express very special thanks to Mike Casey at the Southern Folklife Collection of the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for his knowledge and advice; to Peggy Ellis for her editorial skill and help with information on contemporary country music; to Cathie Pelletier and Jim Glaser for their conversation, information, friendship, and for a trip backstage at the Opry; to Beverly Patterson for advising me on early Primitive Baptist hymns; to Gloria Wansley for inspiration; to Glenn Hinson for his medicine show expertise; to Bob Fagg for tapes and general encouragement; to Al’s Garage of Chapel Hill for automotive advice; to Maggi Vaughn for her interest; and to Hannah Byrum, whose help was invaluable to me as I wrote this book.

  Sources I consulted include:The Bristol Sessions, available through the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville. Much information about the historic Bristol sessions comes from the liner notes of this double album.

  Country: The Music and the Musicians, edited by Paul Kingsbury and Alan Axelrod, compiled by and published for the Country Music Foundation. New York: Abbeville Press, 1988. Alice Bailey’s narration is based on Elmer Bird’s recollection of listening to the Grand Ole Opry on a radio rigged up to a car battery, in chapter 2, “The Triumph of the Hills: Country Radio, 1920-50,” by Charles Wolfe. I also drew from Wolfe’s descriptions of radio barn dances, the section titled “Anatomy of a Barn Dance” in particular.

  Country Music U.S.A. by Bill C. Malone, published for the American Folklore Society. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1968.

  Ghosts of the Southern Mountains and Appalachia by Nancy Roberts. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988; originally published Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978. Ira Keen’s narrative is based on the West Virginia hill country tale collected and written up by Roberts as “The Ghost Fiddler.”

  Lost Highway by Peter Guralnick. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.

  Pilgrims of Paradox: Calvinism and Experience Among Primitive Baptists of the Blue Ridge by James L. Peacock and Ruel Tyson. Washington, D.C., and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989. Whence comes the key phrase “This world is not my home,” as well as information and background on many beliefs and concepts.

  Primitive Baptist Hymns of the Blue Ridge, recorded by Brett Sutton, edited by Daniel Patterson. This album, whose liner notes are wonderful, is one of a series of American Folklore recordings edited by Patterson. The idea of Ezekiel Bailey’s “gift hymn” comes from here, as well as background on other Primitive Baptist beliefs and practices.

  The Singing Family of the Cumberlands by Jean Ritchie. Louisville : The University Press of Kentucky, 1988. Surely this is the best and most charming book ever written about growing up in a real “singing family.”

  The Spirit of the Mountains by Emma Bell Miles. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975; originally published 1905.

  The Stars of Country Music, edited by Bill C. Malone and Judith McCulloh. Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1975.

  The Vi-Ton-Ka Medicine Show, project director Glenn Hinson. New York: American Place Theatre, 1983. In the Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Several medicine show routines are described in this booklet.

  We Wanna Boogie: An Illustrated History of the American Rockabilly Movement by Randy McNutt. Hamilton, OH: HHP Books, 1988. Available through the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville. The memorable phrase “Get hot or go home” comes from this book.

  As I worked on this book, I was especially inspired by the music of Jean Ritchie; the novels The Heart of the Country by Bland Simpson and Ruby Red by William Price Fox; the music of the Red Clay Ramblers of Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and ballad singer Sheila Barnhill’s tales about growing up in Sodom, North Carolina.

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from the following:“The Bad Girl” (no. 97) from Alan Lomax, The Folk Songs of North America (Doubleday, 1960).

  “I’ve Been Gatherin’ Flowers in the Meadow,” “The Muskrat Song,” and “The Old Ship of Zion” from Emma Bell Miles, The Spirit of the Mountains (University of Tennessee Press, 1975; originally published
1905).

  “Churning Song,” “The Cuckoo She’s a Pretty Bird,” “Goin to See My Truelove” (“Jenny Get Around”), and “Horsey Song” by Jean Ritchie. Copyright 1955 Jean Ritchie, Geordie Music Publishing Co. ASCAP.

  “Goin to Boston” by Jean Ritchie. Copyright 1940, 1964 Jean Ritchie, Geordie Music Publishing Co. ASCAP.

  “I Wonder When I Shall Be Married” by Jean Ritchie. Copyright 1946, 1965 Jean Ritchie, Geordie Music Publishing Co. ASCAP. “Riddle Song” by Jean Ritchie. Copyright 1940, 1965 Jean Ritchie, Geordie Music Publishing Co. ASCAP.

  Note: These songs are all Ritchie family variants of traditional songs of Appalachia, with additions and changes made by the Ritchies during their stewardship over the generations. These variants were copyrighted by Jean Ritchie in her name on behalf of the family.