Most Anything You Please

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  “I never did approve of children that young going to school,” Mrs. Pickens piped up. “Children should be at home till they’re seven. That’s what Ruthie should have done with her boys.”

  “That’s old-fashioned, Mother Pickens,” said Ruth. “All the children go to kindergarten now, and they’re better off for it. Gets them out from underfoot, too,” she added in a lower voice meant only for the younger women to hear. Adele snickered.

  “Although they do pick up some bad habits,” Adele said. “When my Libby went off to kindergarten she came back full of sassy talk, I had to give her a good swat on her little backside to keep her in line.”

  “All youngsters are like that, saucy as blacks if they can get away with it,” Audrey said, and looked up to see both sisters-in-law staring at her.

  “Saucy as blacks? Is that what they call it up in New-FOUND-land?” Ruth asked with a smile. “I thought Harry said you didn’t have no coloured folks up there?”

  “Oh, it’s not—I mean, we don’t. I don’t think it means Black people—it’s something to do with Catholics and Protestants.” Audrey had a vague memory of a boy from Brother Rice calling Alf a “dirty black Prod” one of the few times her brother got into a fight on the street. She was sorry she’d used the expression now; she hadn’t intended to draw any attention to herself and the faraway place she came from

  “Well there weren’t none of that kindergarten in my day and I can’t say any of my boys suffered for not going,” Mrs. Pickens said. “And you should keep Henry home till he’s older, Audrey.”

  Another thing: none of them would call Little Hank by his right name. He was christened Henry Charles Pickens the third. The old man was the First, and Harry, though his youngest son, was Henry Charles Pickens Junior. When Harry wanted the same name for his son, Audrey agreed, thinking she could call him Hank after her favourite singer. Hank was a good nickname for Henry, even if Hank Williams’s real name was Hiram. But nobody else liked the nickname except Audrey: everyone called him Henry after his grandfather.

  Dinner was a repeat of Christmas dinner a week ago: the same jokes, the same conversations, the same arguments flaring up and quickly tamped down by Southern good manners. When the women got up to clear the table, everyone segregated again by age and gender: children outside, men to the parlour where someone turned on the radio hoping to hear scores from one of the big football games. Music drifted in to the kitchen where the women had turned to the work of cleanup: Audrey scraped the last of the rice out of the serving dish to the tune of “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes.”

  Then, through the babble of chatter, she heard the DJ mention Hank Williams, and wondered what song was coming up. The men’s talk out in the parlour hushed a bit and she heard the sombre tone from the radio, the dreary music behind the announcer’s words, and Harry’s brother Bert said, “Well that’s a damned shame.”

  “At one a.m. this morning...found dead in his car on his way to…”

  “Can’t really say it’s a big shock, all they been sayin’ about his drinking,” said Fred.

  “Opry let him go because of it. Drank hisself to death, I’d say.” Bert again. Then Harry’s voice, raised a little, “Come in here, Audrey, you’re gonna wanna hear this.”

  She moved, dreamlike, to stand in the parlour door. The men all looked a little bit sad, the way you were supposed to look when you heard somebody famous was dead, but a little bit smug too, because they could say they knew it was coming, he was headed for trouble. Harry’s eyes met hers over the other men’s heads, and she didn’t like what she saw. He was almost smiling, like there was a kind of triumph there. Surely she had to be imagining that.

  The sad news of the young singer’s death—only twenty-nine years old, found dead in his car late at night, the circumstances murky—occupied the conversation in both parlour and kitchen for all of ten minutes. Then the second Hank Williams song was followed by the football scores and the men turned to discussing the game, while the women were quickly diverted from the distant spectre of Hank Williams drinking himself to death to the more immediate one of Adele’s brother-in-law, Verle, who was doing the very same thing at much closer quarters and made a fool of himself at the dance last night. Nobody cares, Audrey thought: that’s what singers and movie stars were for, after all. To distract folks for a few minutes with the glamour of their success and the shame of their fall. Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner had had another big fight on her movie set; Liz Taylor was having a baby with her second husband; poor Hank Williams was dead. On to the next thing.

  She wouldn’t mention it, wouldn’t bring it up again, would pretend that a silly crush on a singer didn’t touch her real life at all. Except that Harry brought it up, that night when she was getting ready for bed. “Sure is a damned shame about Hank Williams, ain’t it?” he said. “Maybe you wanna stop calling little Henry after him, now? Not much of a model for a young feller to look up to.”

  “Judge not, lest ye be not judged,” said Audrey. “Be glad you never had his troubles.”

  Harry laughed: not a nice sound. “Oh, you’ll always be quick to defend any handsome feller—I know what you’re like. Always sniffin’ around for someone you think is better than your own husband.”

  “You be quiet, now! I never did a thing to deserve that! I haven’t laid eyes on another man since we’ve been married….”

  “No, you don’t get much chance, stuck out here in the country, do you? Don’t you think I know why you’re always at me to take you off to dances and into town? I remember you back at them dances on the base in Newfoundland, always after the fellows, flashing your tits at anything in a uniform—”

  Too late, Audrey realized he’d had more than a few whiskies with Bert and Fred, and while Harry wasn’t a frequent drunk or usually a mean one, there was something different in him tonight, a snarl in his voice that made her protest die unspoken in her mouth. He crossed the floor in two quick strides—it was a tiny room—and grabbed her by the wrist, hard enough to hurt. He pushed her down onto the bed, shoved her legs apart with his knee planted between them.

  “Harry, stop. You’re hurting—”

  “You bitch. You’d like to be off at dances, wouldn’t you, putting the moves on every sorry-assed fella there, wouldn’t you? But not your husband. You got no time for your own husband.”

  That was hardly fair. It wasn’t like he’d even come looking for it much, not since she had lost the second baby. Mostly he just rolled over and went to sleep, and if he did want anything it was a quick fumble in the dark. It was hardly any surprise she hadn’t gotten pregnant again—Audrey had begun to feel Harry didn’t even want her anymore.

  Tonight he wanted something, but it wasn’t her, not in any way she recognized. His hands pinned her shoulders to the bed, both his knees were shoved between hers, forcing her legs apart. She wanted to cry out, to kick, to bite, but with every nerve she was aware of her son asleep on the other side of the wall. She closed her eyes as her husband’s hands moved from her shoulders, tearing at her clothing, his clothing. She prayed that it would be over quickly.

  The next morning, the second day of 1953, she woke up at the same time as always, got little Hank up, cooked breakfast. Harry went off to work with the same goodbye as always. Audrey turned on the radio and heard another Hank Williams song. The announcer said his body was being taken back to Montgomery, Alabama, and the funeral would be held there in two days.

  Audrey took her son’s little pile of wooden blocks and lured him into her bedroom to sit on the bed while she took out her suitcase and began to pack her clothes.

  AUDREY

  She took the five o’clock out of town, changed trains in Shreveport, and travelled through the night. “We’re taking a little trip!” she had told Hank. She hadn’t told Harry anything. Packed and left while he was at work and didn’t leave so much as a note. She knew that was wrong. She should have lef
t a note or something. What would she tell him when they came back home? How could she ever explain running off to Alabama for Hank Williams’s funeral?

  Those were the thoughts that kept her mind churning and her hands trembling throughout that dark night ride. Eventually, when Hank fell asleep across her lap, she dozed off too, waking fitfully every time the train pulled into a station in some tiny town and passengers around her got on and off. They changed again in New Orleans, Hank so sleepy he was almost like a piece of luggage. She had her own big suitcase and a little one for him. She had packed way more than they’d need to go to Alabama for two days. When Harry got home and saw what was missing from the closet, he would think she had taken the boy and run away for good.

  By the time the train stopped in Montgomery, her neck and back were all stiff and sore and her eyes felt like they’d been rubbed with sandpaper. Hank woke confused, twisting his head up to look at her and say, “Where are we, Mama?” That little drawl in his voice that made him sound like half a stranger to her. “I’m hungry.”

  “Me too, honey. We’re going to get off this train now and find a place to get some breakfast.”

  They found it—scrambled eggs and grits—in a diner a little ways from the station, after Audrey had put their two suitcases in a locker. She’d come back for them once she figured out where they were going to stay tonight. The diner was busy, and the waitress, a chatty middle-aged woman with bottle-blonde hair piled high on her head, said, “Looks like half Alabama’s come to town for the funeral.”

  Audrey nodded. “That’s what we came for, too.”

  The waitress’s face softened, as if they shared a common loss. “It’s a cryin’ shame, ain’t it? Him so young, and so much talent. Folks ‘round here have always been proud of him. Where’d y’all come from?”

  “Louisiana, up near Shreveport.”

  “That’s a long way to come, just for today.”

  “I loved his music a lot. I seen him once, at the Hayride. I just—wanted to be here.”

  The waitress laid a pitcher of syrup on the table along with their plates. “That’s what folks are saying,” she said. “They say the hall will be all full with the important folks, but they’re settin’ up speakers in the park across the way for folks who want to hear the service. If y’all’da been here yesterday you coulda gone past and seen the coffin, they say thousands of folks did.” Audrey knew she had to be careful about every penny, but she left the waitress an extra nickel as a tip.

  It would be easier to do this if she were on her own, to follow the crowds till she came to the park outside the auditorium, where people were already gathering for the funeral service at one o’clock. She could even have come yesterday, filed past the coffin, seen his face for the second time, closed and peaceful in sleep. But she couldn’t do any of it easily today, with a three-year-old in tow, whining about the heat and about being thirsty. “Where are we going, Mama? Can I go play? Play in the park?”

  There was no place to play; it wasn’t that kind of park. Just a little grassy square across the street from the city hall, and even if it had been a place for children to play, it was too crowded. There was barely space to stand, and all over she saw squirming children held by their parents’ firm hands.

  A woman nearby gave Audrey a smile of sympathy. “It’s hard for a young’un to understand, ain’t it?”

  “It is,” Audrey said. “He’s named after Hank Williams, I just wanted him to be here today, so he’d be able to say, later, that he was here.”

  “Seems like the least we can do,” the woman said.

  Was that really why she had brought little Hank? “This is the man you were named after,” she told him on the way over to the park from the diner this morning. “I called you Hank because of him. He’s the one who sang all those songs we like to sing along with on the radio, you know?”

  “Like about the whippoorwill,” Hank said. “And the jambalaya.”

  “That’s right.” Now she tried to quieten Hank down as the crackle and hiss of the speakers announced that the service was about to start. The park, and the streets around it, were packed with more people than Audrey had ever seen in one place in her life. Nobody around her had even tried to get into the municipal auditorium. “I talked to a man who lined up all last night to get in this morning,” said someone nearby, “but there’s only about twenty-five hundred it can hold, and they do say there’s more like twenty-five thousand people come to town just for the funeral.”

  When she’d thought about coming she’d imagined, of course, that she would be inside the auditorium. Probably all these people crowded around her imagined that too. She’d thought she’d be able to see Hank Williams up front in the casket, that it would be like being at a church service. She hadn’t imagined little Hank at her side, wriggling and trying to twist out of her iron grip on his wrist. Yet she’d never even considered leaving him home with his father.

  There was a pop in the speakers, and then quite suddenly a man’s voice, deep and resonant, flowed out of them.

  The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures…

  The old psalm, recited so often to her by Ellen, memorized in Sunday School, stilled the crowd, line by line, till when it ended they were all hushed as if they really were in church. Surely goodness and mercy had not followed Hank Williams all the days of his life, but perhaps he would dwell in the house of the Lord now, at last.

  The preacher finished the psalm and announced a “coloured quartet” whose harmonizing voices came out of the speakers next. Then it was back to the Scripture, with the part from 1 Corinthians—wasn’t it?—the bit about the dead being raised incorruptible. Old words, comforting even if you didn’t know whether you believed them. O Death, where is thy sting?

  The crowd in the park stayed quiet, except for a few squalling babies. Folks gave the mothers of the babies dirty looks, and when Little Hank interrupted to whine, “When are we going home?” Audrey squatted down to whisper in his ear, “You be quiet now, or I am going to give you a good lickin’ on your behind, so just hush up!” Her voice must have been fierce enough to convince him because he folded cross-legged onto the ground at her feet, playing with the toy truck she had had the good sense to put in her purse. For the next little while only the weight of his small body against her feet and ankles reminded her that he was there.

  More Scripture, then the minister introduced Roy Acuff, who said a few kind words about Hank (“No finer boy has ever come or gone, as far as we’re concerned”) before he began singing Hank’s own song, “I Saw the Light.” All around Audrey, people wept openly, but Audrey was dry-eyed.

  It was as if she had come all this way for the funeral thinking she’d see and hear Hank himself, like she did that night at the Hayride, and while that was clearly a crazy thought, she did have that feeling of letdown. As if she’d bought a ticket for a show where he was on the bill, and then found out that he’d cancelled, last minute. Why had she expected that standing with a crowd of people outside his memorial service would make her feel closer to Hank Williams?

  Little Hank stood up and started pulling at her skirt. “Can we go now, Mama? Can we go?”

  “You hush that youngster up,” snapped the man next to Audrey. Everyone was straining to hear the preacher speaking over the public-address system now, and Audrey bent down again to hiss another threat into Little Hank’s ear. He should have been home with his daddy, she thought. He wasn’t going to remember this day anyhow. The preacher was talking now about Hank, but not really about Hank, after the first few minutes. It was all about America and Jesus. America, such a great country, where even a little shoeshine boy could grow up to sing songs that were loved by millions. And Jesus, everyone needed to just put their hand in the hand of Jesus and it would all be all right when God called us home, like he just called Hank. Lots of tribute to how much every
one loved his songs, but not a word about the man’s struggles. He wrote “I Saw the Light” but it seemed to Audrey, following the gossip in the papers these last months, that mostly he saw darkness, and tried to sing his way out of it. You wouldn’t talk about that at the man’s funeral, of course—you wouldn’t mention his drinking and divorce and all the nastiness. Don’t speak ill of the dead.

  The last hymn was another quartet, this one singing “Precious Memories,” and around Audrey, the people gathered in the park joined in the singing, first a few thready voices and then more and more until it was a chorus that swept her up. Little Hank was still wriggling and twisting around the hem of her skirt and she gathered him up in her arms, nestling him on her hip. Lulled by the voices around, maybe, he stopped fighting her and snuggled in, drooping his head on her shoulder.

  Audrey sang along, all the voices rising together, and in the middle it hit her that she travelled all these miles as if somehow thinking she’d hear Hank Williams sing again, and the truth was, he never would. Not this song nor any other. She’d never see that long, sad face she remembered so vividly from that night at the Hayride, the night she pictured Hank Williams instead of her husband next to her in bed. It was over, all of it—Hank Williams’s young life, and her own marriage, and whatever bundle of hopes and dreams she had dragged down south here with her. She no longer wondered why she had hauled her son along to a funeral he was too young to understand, or why she had packed two suitcases. Or what she would say to Harry when she went back.

  Tears were rolling down her cheeks at last—what a relief to be able to cry, here with all the other crying people, all this sadness in one place. Little Hank reached up his hand and patted her wet cheeks. “Don’t cry, Mama.”

  When the hearse had gone past and the speakers had hissed to silence and the crowd began to disperse, Audrey sagged onto a bench under a tree while Little Hank ran around and round in circles. She needed someplace to stay for the night—some boarding house where they could get a meal and a decent night’s sleep.