— Oh, I remembers poor old Uncle Zeb, he must of known a thousand songs, says Aunt Jemima Tuff. Her and her husband, the one everybody calls Ragged Ralph behind his back, are in town for the week so Aunt Jemima can see the specialist at the Grace Hospital. There’s a few more relatives here too, Louise and Cal who are heading down to the Boston States soon for work. And me own youngsters, Audrey and Alf looking bored, Marilyn trying to look bored because she copies everything Audrey does. The little ones, Frank and June, are glad enough to sing along. Them and the old folks belts out all the hymns and folk songs, from “When the Roll is Called up Yonder” to “The Star of Logy Bay.”
— Well this is one of grandfather’s old songs, and it’s about a ship called the Sallie Ann. Nothing to do with the Salvation Army, now, this was long before we had any of them people down our way. No, the captain named it for the woman he loved. Who, it so happens, was not his wife. His wife was named Barbara, and was she pleased about the ship being called the Sallie Ann? No she was not, and no more was Sallie Ann’s husband, which was a shame because he was the first mate.
Audrey ducks her head and whispers something to Alf again, and I knows she’s saying that half the time my stories about the songs goes on longer than the songs themselves. I knows the young ones don’t have much patience with the songs, but then I never did myself when I was their age. I learned these few songs from grandfather Holloway, but how many more would I have learned if I’d paid attention instead of being in such a hurry to go beating around the cove with me buddies? You can’t make young folks listen no matter how much you wish they would. No matter how much they’ll wish it themselves, years on when it’s too late.
Come all ye good people and gather ye ‘round...
Never mind, the first notes and the first lines of the song are here, and I’m singing for them whether they likes it or not. Singing for poor old Jemima who’ll likely be dead of that cancer in her stomach before the year is out. Singing for Louise and Cal off to the States, and Cal’s brother out on a navy ship in the ocean, and everyone else far from home. A few songs from home to tuck away in memory, take with you on the journey.
Mostly I ’low I’m singing for her, though. My Ellen, my lovely little Nell. She sits there by the coal stove, her back straight as a rod, a couple of grey threads just starting to show in her hair but as pretty and proud as she used to be back behind the counter of her father’s shop out home. The hours she puts in now in our shop, the work and the worry on top of looking after the house and the youngsters. She deserves this, her day of rest, a few minutes of music and peace and quiet. She loves a bit of music.
As for the youngsters, the ones paying attention and the ones not—will there be any one of them, or their children, who’ll want to pick up the accordion and learn a song? Alf showed a bit of interest in it a year or so back, but now he’s older all he thinks about is making money and going out with girls. Still and all, maybe there’ll be one of them, someday, or maybe some grandchild who’s not even born yet, who’ll say, Now this is a song I learned from my grandfather, old Wes Holloway from Candle Cove, who moved into town and worked as a carpenter, but who was always a bayman at heart.
There might be. You never knows what the future might hold, do you?
two
SO LONESOME I COULD CRY
1948–1953
AUDREY
Audrey suspected Harry’s sister-in-law Ruth had helped him plan their anniversary celebration. Maybe she had even suggested it. Dinner in a restaurant in Shreveport, then the Hayride show at the Municipal Auditorium: Louisiana’s own version of the Grand Ole Opry. When they were courting, Audrey had imagined her life would be full of evenings like this—dressing up, going out to eat in restaurants, going dancing or to a show or to the movies. They were going to live in America where people did things like that all the time, where women put on pearl necklaces and matching earrings to greet their husbands when they came home from work. All Audrey’s pictures of life in the USA came straight out of the pages of magazines.
She had given the USA a year of her life so far, and nothing in it looked like a movie or a magazine. She had never imagined a town like South Ridge, Louisiana, although when she complained about it in letters to her sister, Marilyn said it sounded no worse than any small town in Newfoundland. But Audrey wouldn’t have lived in a place like Candle Cove or Wesleyville or Bonavista. Not for any man she’d ever met would she have streeled herself off to some outport fishing village and lived like it was the last century. She’d made the mistake of assuming that going to America had to mean going to something better.
The Pickens family home was no smaller, in terms of square feet, than the house she’d grown up in. It might have even been a little bigger, though it was all on one level instead of the two storeys she was used to. And where the house at home had had Mom, Dad, four siblings and the shop, it had never felt as crowded as the house with Harry’s parents and grandmother felt to her. Their house was a bungalow that looked like it was sinking into the ground, and it always looked sad and run-down. Harry’s mother was forever painting windowsills and planting flowerpots, putting up new curtains, so there was no reason for it to look as tatty as it did. The house should have looked smart but it was as if the land was pulling it down, sucking it into the sandy clay, fighting Mrs. Pickens’s every effort to make it beautiful.
Harry said it would be better when they had their own place. He had a piece of land near his parents’ house and he had a little house framed out and roofed. “We’ll want that before any young’uns come along,” he said with his slow grin.
Audrey remembered Alf working on the house he was building for himself and Treese. Treese had been off her head with excitement about painting and wallpapering, picking out towels and sheets and collecting hand-me-down furniture from various relatives. Audrey wished she could feel some of that same excitement when Harry talked about their new house, but she would have been a lot happier if he’d said he would get them an apartment—even a little place, even two rooms—over a shop here in Shreveport, or any decent-sized town. Anything bigger than South Ridge, any place with shops and people instead of the endless empty miles of land and sky and those huge gnarled oak trees that looked like something had gotten out of hand and just kept growing, like cancer.
Harry’s father was aggressively silent: he could be in the house for hours without uttering a word. Audrey thought she had probably heard him say about a hundred words since she’d met the man. Harry’s mother only spoke when she needed to, usually to give Audrey directions about some chore. Some days, when the silence pressed down too hard, Audrey would sit out on the front porch. It was so hot, and a lifetime in Newfoundland had taught her that outdoors was always cooler. This clearly was not true in Louisiana; outside was hotter here, at least in the height of summer. Even under the shade of the porch the sun’s heat would hit her like a slap, she who had always thought, like everyone back home did, that heat was a good thing.
A warm sunny day at home was the thing that lifted your spirits, the thing you slogged on towards after a long cold winter. Here in Louisiana, heat was something else altogether. Harry’s sister had near to died of heat stroke as a child, his mother said. Near to died. Heat was something that could kill you if you stayed out in it, like the cold could at home.
But still she sat out on the porch. Outside, Audrey would look at the empty fields and imagine streets running up and down through them. Then she’d imagine houses, one after another, row upon row. Houses that huddled together and leaned on each other for support. She imagined voices, layering the yells of children and the shouts of their mothers calling them in for dinner over the lonely sound of the birds calling. She built herself a whole Rabbittown out of memories there in the fields in front of the cabin, and then she imagined the ping of the door behind her, people going in and out of the shop.
In letters to her mother and father she put the best fac
e on it, told them about her chores around the house and what a good housekeeper Harry’s mother was and how kind she had been, none of which was untrue. In letters to Marilyn and Valerie and Lorraine, she made fun of the things that made her want to cry. She joked about how isolated the farm was, how tiny the nearest town, how backward and slow and silent the people were. She wrote these letters out on the porch, sometimes, or other times she’d be driven by the heat back inside to the table. The rare times that Mrs. Pickens took the old lady and they went to a neighbour’s house were the best, because Audrey was alone in the house and she could turn on the radio and listen to music.
The radio wasn’t on much, except for news and weather reports. Mrs. Pickens considered it a waste of time to listen to radio serials, and nobody in the house seemed fond of music. The Harry that Audrey had dated back home loved the hit parade and loved to dance, but Audrey had been sentenced to months of near silence in his parents’ house, except for hymns at the Baptist church on Sundays.
But tonight they were going to Shreveport. Audrey felt her spirits lift as they drove away from the too-quiet house in South Ridge. When Harry had suggested a night out in Shreveport for their anniversary and asked would she like to go see the Hayride show, Audrey knew Ruth must have given him the idea. But she pretended that it showed how well he knew her, how he understood her unhappiness and knew that music was the only thing that gave her either bit of comfort.
The first act was the Tennessee Mountain Boys. The headliner for the evening was Bob Wills, who would come on later; Audrey was excited about that because she had seen him in the movies as well as hearing him on the radio. She snuggled up against Harry, wishing he would be a bit more affectionate. He had his arm over the back of the seat but it wasn’t really around her, just lying there. She remembered how he used to hold her hand when they went to movies and concerts back home. Of course couples weren’t so affectionate after they’d been married awhile, but only a year? They were going to a hotel, and that had to be a bit more romantic than their bed in the room next to Harry’s parents’ room, with the walls that seemed paper-thin. She’d expected that over dinner, or during the show, he’d start acting more affectionate, saying romantic things like he used to say to her. Then later, when they had relations in the hotel room, it would be different from the hurried, almost shameful business it was in his parents’ house.
But Harry just sat there, tapping his toe to the music, his free hand beating out time on his knee rather than seeking her hand. A new singer came out, a tall dark-haired young man with a guitar, and Audrey hoped he’d sing something romantic, something that might put Harry in the right kind of a mood.
The singer talked a little bit before he sang, telling the crowd this was a new song he was just trying out and they were going to be the first people ever to hear it. His voice had that same southern drawl that everyone’s did around here. It sounded so exotic when she used to hear Harry talk back home, but accents like that were a dime a dozen all around her now. Audrey knew that deep drawl was like a round-the-bay accent back home: to some city folks, it marked a person as being from the backwoods, poor and uneducated. But when this man with the guitar opened his mouth, even though it was pure hillbilly, it gave Audrey a shiver. His voice was so slow and rich, it was like something poured over her.
Then he began plucking the strings of the guitar and the song rolled out, and though she had been listening to music all evening it was like this was the first song tonight, maybe the first song ever.
Hear that lonesome whippoorwill
He sounds too blue to fly
That midnight train is whining low
I’m so lonesome I could cry
Audrey wasn’t sure what a whippoorwill was—there were so many strange birds down here, all with their different calls, and the only birdsong she could remember from St. John’s was the harsh squawk of seagulls. But she did know the whine of that midnight train, and she knew the aching longing in the singer’s voice.
Sudden tears welled up in her eyes. What would Harry think? But he didn’t notice, didn’t look her way at all as Audrey, who never cried, let the tears roll down her cheeks.
The singer performed another song or two after that one, his voice as lovely, but neither one cutting to her heart the way the lonesome song did. It was his face that Audrey couldn’t keep her eyes off of, that long mobile face and those haunting dark eyes. When he stepped back from the microphone and the emcee repeated his name, she etched it on her memory. Hank, Hank Williams. She felt the way she did the night she met Harry at the dance at the Caribou Hut—like she had fallen in love, though only with a man who stood behind a guitar and a microphone half an auditorium away from her.
She wished she could buy that song on a record, to listen to it over and over, but of course they didn’t have a record player and she couldn’t see any way they could get such a luxury anytime soon. When Hank Williams left the stage Audrey scrubbed her face with her handkerchief to make sure no trace of tears remained.
Their hotel room looked like a palace compared to the narrow room with the sagging bed they had slept on all those long months. Audrey’s eyes roamed the room, taking in the firm, high white bed, the crisp bedspread, the polished wood of the bedside table with its lamp throwing a circle of warm light. Then Harry did that throat-clearing thing she hated and said, “Don’t seem like much for five dollars, does it?”
But they lay down together and made love, though not with the hungry passion that used to fuel them when they kissed and necked in a lane off Merrymeeting Road back home. Why was it so much less exciting once you were allowed to do it every night? In the dark, Audrey closed her eyes and pictured the singer’s face, heard his voice. Her mother would probably say that was a sin—picturing some other man while she was in bed with her husband. But Audrey was so lonesome, so lonesome she could cry.
AUDREY
Audrey waited till she was three months along before she told Harry. It wasn’t like she ever made a decision to keep it from him; every day she woke up and thought, Today I have to tell him, and then somehow the day would unwind and she never got to the point of saying the words. It seemed too personal a thing to share with someone who, she thought more and more often, was almost a stranger to her. But of course that was foolish.
She justified it by telling herself she couldn’t be completely certain till she’d missed her monthlies three times and she felt her breasts swell a little and get tender. Even her stomach began to round out a tiny bit, not so anyone would notice when she was dressed, but she could see it herself. It wasn’t like she could go to a doctor; she didn’t even know where the doctor’s office was except that it was in town somewhere, and when they needed to go to town Harry’s father drove there in the truck. She could just see herself asking Mr. Pickens to drive her to the doctor’s office and having to make up some kind of reason why.
Audrey cooked roast beef for supper on the night she knew she couldn’t put it off any longer. A roast was a treat; lots of nights she made corned beef hash or beans. Pork and chicken came from the Pickens family’s own hogs and hens; she didn’t often buy meat. Now that they were in their own little house she had to cook every night, but she stuck to cooking things that were familiar to her, not Southern things like the rice and gumbo Harry’s mother cooked. When Mrs. Pickens put a stew on the table one night and told her it was squirrel, Audrey thought she’d pass out and slide under the table. Harry complained that Audrey didn’t make the things his mother made, but Audrey, who knew she herself was no great shakes as a cook, had no intention of trying any of Mrs. Pickens’s recipes.
Harry looked at the roast as she slid two slices onto his plate and said, “Well, this looks nice.”
“I hope it is nice.”
“Beef’s a little pricey though, ain’t it?”
Audrey brought the gravy boat to the table. When she and Harry first got married she was used to the way
her mother did things at home, with everything set out on the table and the family all sitting down together. At home, Dad said grace and everyone served themselves from the dishes on the table. But Harry expected things to be done the way his mother did. Mrs. Pickens sat her husband down at the table and brought everything over from the stove, filled his plate for him, even poured his cup of coffee, before she sat down and served herself. So now Audrey did that too.
“I thought I’d cook something special. It’s kind of— it’s a special occasion. I’ve got some news, Harry.” Though she was seated now and it was okay to dish up her own dinner she didn’t reach for the platter. Her hands twisted in her apron. Her heart was pounding so hard she was surprised Harry couldn’t hear or see it.
She waited for him to prompt her, to ask what the news was or even give her a knowing kind of look, but he sliced into his meat and chewed a mouthful in a way that felt like a reproach, even though he didn’t actually say it was tough or dry. Something about the motion of his jaw—she knew he was thinking it. Finally, into the silence, she made herself say, “It’s good news. I think you’ll be happy.”
“You better tell me then, see if you’re right about that.”
“It’s—I’m expecting. A baby.” Still he didn’t say anything, didn’t even look up from his plate, so she added, “In May, I think, or thereabouts.”
Harry finished the mouthful he was chewing, wiped his mouth with the napkin, laid down napkin, fork, and knife and looked up at her. His eyes met hers but she couldn’t read his expression. “A baby. You sure?”
“About as sure as I can be without going to a doctor.”
“No call for a doctor if all’s going well.” He nodded. “Well, that is quite a thing. A baby. I don’t—I don’t know what to say. I mean, it seems a bit sudden, but I know it’s not. We been married more’n a year, and Ma keeps asking me if you’re in the family way.”
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