Homeplace

by John Lingan

  Despite its subtitle, Hahn’s book is not a conservative jeremiad in favor of general deregulation. Instead, it is a cry against the corporatization of medicine and the federal government’s seeming support for it. After all, their booming, tax-exempt revenues allow conglomerates like Valley Health to absorb all the new paperwork and managerial tasks with relatively little effort—hiring additional workers to make calls and fill out forms all day even counts toward their community benefit. Hahn doesn’t mention Valley Health by name, but his book is a point-by-point tour of the medical industry to convey “the need for government regulation, good government regulation, to protect citizens from the consequences of uncontrolled corporate greed.” In Deer Hunting with Jesus, Joe Bageant essentially described Valley Health as a federally funded Walmart of medicine, with an economic mandate to absorb everything in sight. Ten years later, even after new Democrat-sponsored legislation to improve health-care insurance coverage among low-income people, Hahn’s own book showed how the situation had only grown worse.

  Oscar had as much knowledge of these complications as anyone can, yet he maintained his social worker’s optimism. “I like it here,” he told me. “I like the festivals, they remind me of home.” He had recently returned from his youngest sister’s quinceañera, back in Mexico. “And it’s nice that Winchester remains pretty locally owned.”

  He wasn’t wrong. The business that had taken Perry’s place wasn’t a chain. Few of the shops or restaurants on the walking mall were corporate, either. But the same chamber of commerce that recognized the appeal of a quaint, homey shopping district also recognized the value of an enormous mall just outside town, and acres upon acres of big-box shopping surrounding it. In either case, the regional economy, like the national one, was forever tipping toward corporate benefit.

  This was the world that Oscar had inherited in Winchester: more diverse and accepting in many ways, but still stratified, and the people on the lower strata were still clinging by their fingernails. It wasn’t impossible to start an independent business—for most minorities especially, it was easier than ever, just as there were now more resources for non-English-speaking children. But every component of the economy, from the rising value of land to the cost of well-intentioned regulations, makes owning that business more difficult than it used to be.

  I asked Oscar if he suffered from burnout, a common affliction for social workers. Do the drug casualties and the lost lives weigh on him day after day?

  “It can be hard,” he admitted, “though I’m committed to this. When I get home, I like to cook. That’s what brings me joy. Making the food that I had growing up. And when the job becomes frustrating, I do have a fantasy of doing that full-time. My dream job,” he said with his usual bashful grin, “is to open a restaurant.”

  Late summer 2016. Friends had installed a plywood ramp leading up to Jim and Bertha’s front door, and a midafternoon storm had made it slick and smooth. Up I went, knocking before entering immediately; I’d been told that Jim wouldn’t be able to get up and let me in.

  He was in a wheelchair in the kitchen, near the card table covered in documents and printouts and envelopes from Valley Health. He looked collapsed inside a white T-shirt and pajama pants, but his eyes brightened when he saw me. The barest curl of a smile, bordered, as I’d never seen before, by white stubble. He took my hand and gripped it gently in his bloodless fingers. I held on as I sat down in a lawn chair by the table and looked into his worried eyes. Sean Hannity was shaking his head on a TV above the couch.

  “Got Penny here,” he said, referring to his daughter who was visiting from San Diego. She’d been there since March, when a fresh round of hospitalizations began. Jim was at the point in his sickness when he needed surgeries to recover from surgeries. Treatment for a fall left him bruised and swelling. Swelling made it harder to move and breathe. The lack of movement weakened and demoralized him.

  Other losses did as well. On November 7, he’d spoken with Charlie Dick, just as they did a few times a week.

  “He was telling me about NASCAR,” Jim said. “Talking to me about the new cars. Then the next day I got that call.” Charlie died in his sleep, eighty-one years old. The burial was back at Shenandoah Memorial, and Jim and Bertha made it down. Julie invited them to sit with family for the service.

  Buddy Emmons, Ernest Tubb’s pioneering pedal steel player, had died a few months before Charlie, and Merle Haggard died a few months after. Fittingly, Jim had the past in mind. He wanted to tell me about booking Waylon Jennings for a concert near Winchester in the early 1970s. He wanted me to know about the old-time banjo player Wade Mainer, about the religious singer Jimmy Miller, about the greatness of cowboy balladeer Marty Robbins. I asked when he was happiest.

  “When we first came up here,” he said. “Only had one thing to take care of.”

  Was he scared?

  “Nope. I’ve had a good life. You gotta get ready. I hope people remember me for being a good man. For being a family man.”

  Penny arrived, walking through the door with a woman I recognized from the restaurant. Behind them came the other woman’s husband, in a camouflage coat. They all smelled of cigarettes, which made Jim reach for his. He couldn’t light it, just held it in his mouth and sat the lighter in his lap.

  “They brought you something, Dad,” Penny told him, sitting on the couch and turning down the television.

  “You said you needed a new belt for that mower,” said the camouflaged man, offering Jim a plastic bag from a local hardware store. Jim seemed awestruck. He reached for his wallet.

  “C’mon now,” the woman said. “Let us do something for you.” Bertha entered now too, perpetually shaking her head about the business. Her dog, a little yappy white thing, ran up to her eagerly.

  “Y’all got him that?” she asked the visitors. They nodded. “Too good to us,” she said. She went over to the couch and put a loving arm around Penny, whose long wavy brown hair fell over her shoulders.

  “I don’t know what we’d be doing without Penny these months,” she told me. Penny took her hand and they leaned their heads together.

  The gift-bearing friends wished everyone a good night and Penny yawned, arms outstretched. Bertha retired to a reclining chair and yanked the handle hard to pop the leg support out. The dog jumped on her and positioned his belly for scratching. She obliged. Jim turned up the TV as a panel argued over footage of Hillary Clinton waving from a tarmac.

  “Who you votin’ for, John?” Bertha asked. The election was in less than three months. I admitted the truth: a fully brainwashed East Coast liberal, I supported the lady on the tarmac, mainly out of fear of the competition. Bertha laughed and shook her head.

  “I don’t know about them,” she said, trailing off.

  “Hillary,” Jim said skeptically. Then, after a minute, “I don’t trust her.” Their skepticism didn’t surprise me. This was a common refrain that summer, and not only among poor white people in trailers, though the focus and the blame seemed to always be on them. What had any Clinton done to improve life on Highland Ridge, anyway? What story or vision of this country could a career politician tell to Jim McCoy? A lifetime of obstinate individualism and geographic dislocation had left Jim beyond the reach of traditional political platitudes. No one in that realm spoke his language, but at least Fox was easy to understand.

  I didn’t want to go. I didn’t know if I could handle saying good-bye to Jim this time. I stopped talking, and let this exhausted family simply sit and rest, unconcerned with hospitality for once. On the lounger, rubbing softly behind her grateful dog’s ears, Bertha watched the news, rapt.

  9

  Blessed to Be Gray

  On Wednesday, September 7, 2016, about 300 years to the day since the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe crossed the Swift Run Gap, an enormous storm rolled over the northern Shenandoah and approached the Blue Ridge Mountains, headed east. Massive churning clouds, dark black and blue, billowed and flashed with veins of jagged lightning.
The kind of nightmare storm that every mountain resident has in the back of their mind when they scan the sky: Wagnerian rain, root-ripping wind, and close, quaking thunder.

  Penny watched it approach. She was outside having a cigarette and taking a break from Jim’s bedside. The weekend before had been Labor Day, the first without Charlie, though the Sunday party went on as usual. Jim had made a brief appearance, almost an apparition, guided by Bertha and the hospice nurse that had moved in with them a few days earlier. Penny was scheduled to return to California by the end of the week, but everything had slowed down. They were going hour to hour now, seeing if Jim made one of his trademark recoveries. Just a minute before she’d stepped outside, Jim was on the phone with one of the bands he booked regularly at the Troubadour.

  The rain picked up, and Penny returned to the house. When she came in, she saw Bertha’s face, and she knew.

  The word got out through the Troubadour Facebook page in early evening, then out through the Celebrating Patsy Cline page and Twitter account, and through a series of phone calls stretching from Highland Ridge to San Diego, Nashville, Winchester, and all points beyond where people felt invested in the saga of Patsy Cline. I was under an awning in the D.C. suburbs, my hair flattened by rain after a miscalculated attempt to cross a parking lot at the tail end of the storm. Soaked through, my shoes now squishing with every step, I took refuge in a dry spot and pulled my phone out to check for damage. I scrolled through messages and saw one spare note from the Patsy folks: beloved friend, Joltin’ Jim McCoy, has passed away at home. Arrangements to come. Attached was a picture I hadn’t seen, a 1960s black and white press photo from J&J Talent Service in Winchester, showing Jim seated with a big blond acoustic guitar balanced between his knees and his name emblazoned on the strap. Rhinestone musical notes wound up his sleeves and across his suit jacket and a pristine white cowboy hat was perched atop his head, curled up at the edges like a soaring manta ray. His face was confident but unsmiling, and his left hand, resting on his left knee, looked veiny, dark, and muscular. He looked as sharp and stunning as a navy cadet. The last burbles of thunder rolled away and I looked at this picture, marveling that even though I’d only known him as a frail old man, this was still the vision of him that I carried in my head. Even slow, sick, and dying, he always sat at the center of a world he’d made.

  It took nearly a week for the funeral arrangements to come together. Finally, on September 13, an overflow crowd gathered at the Carlyle Chapel in the Helsley-Johnson Funeral Home on the northern end of Berkeley Springs. It was a Tuesday morning during the early school year, so the neighborhood was mostly empty. I parked near the 7-Eleven and waited for a hauling truck to cut through Washington Street so I could cross. The line of mourners stretched onto the funeral home’s wooden porch stairs. Inside, there were dozens of family members, all the way down to great-great-grandchildren, along with plenty of friends and locals. Jim lay in repose, in a suit and boutonniere, casket open. The lights were low and the textured ceiling was speckled with small shadows. Bertha was up front in black, near the twins.

  I took a seat in one of the folding chairs the funeral home had added to the chapel lobby. I didn’t see many suits or dresses around me. Two young men sat next to each other with Metallica T-shirts visible under their untucked Western wear. I was next to a table with a guest book and a picture of Jim wearing the cowboy hat and guitar-patterned collared shirt that he’d worn the first weekend I met him. In the photo he looked strong and barrel-chested, though it couldn’t have been taken more than a couple years before I arrived.

  Bertha’s son, Pastor Andy Shanholtz, presided over the service. He’d come in from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where he’d made his home for decades—far from the tumult of his childhood, by design. But he spoke of Jim lovingly.

  “Ever the showman, Jim sat down with me in 2012 with the plans he’d made for this service,” he said. “Every song today, every reading, is Jim’s choice.”

  And in full Joltin’ Jim style, he played the hits, starting with Psalm 23, read by the pastor. Then came Patsy’s version of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” her subdued but bouncing march recorded with the Jordanaires. It played over the small black speakers mounted in the corners of the room, and was immediately followed by “She’s the Best,” which Jim had written later in his life for Bertha. The recording was Jim’s own, his wobbly, elderly baritone playing above the crack Troubadour Studios band. It was a slow waltz, devotional, walking through a day of domestic tranquility from morning coffee onward. The chorus was the classic country kind: a sudden harmonic leap up and slow descent down, guided by Jim’s repeated praise: “She’s the best I’ll ever do.” Then finally, Jim and Charlie’s duet on “Waltz Across Texas.” It was a recent recording, and neither of them were able to project and sustain very well. But it was all the more poignant to hear these two men, now both ghosts, creak and groan like this. They’d outlasted bigger legends and brighter talents, and seen many of the greatest up close. But they also knew that music was, at root, just a way for people to be together. It was an excuse to communicate, to share, to celebrate.

  After a reading of James 4:14—“You do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes”—Pastor Shanholtz commenced his recollections. His memories were all of light and growth: Jim loved family time, especially Christmas, and had to hang those strands of rainbow bulbs everywhere he could fit them. “He could grow plants in clay,” as well; gardening was second only to his passion for music. In work and in life, Jim wanted roots, wanted color, wanted the maximum possible atmosphere of comfort and sustenance. In the pastor’s words, “Jim never lost a friend.”

  We all stood and marched single file to see the coffin up close and pay our respects to Bertha and the family. Our soundtrack for this walk was “I Fall to Pieces,” Patsy’s second, career-making hit. I was surprised by the choice. Jim had told me more than once that his favorite Patsy song was “Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray,” an archetypal lost-love weeper. And of course, “San Antonio Rose” was the one he heard her sing first. But instead he chose this song, a loping oldies radio staple from 1961. Unlike “Crazy,” released the following year, “I Fall to Pieces” was only three chords, a perfectly straightforward honky-tonk song. No complex phrasings or melodic leaps, just a steady and persistent rhythm track over a graceful vocal line that rose and fell one word at a time. But the meaning of any song will change when you hear it near an open casket, and approaching my departed friend I heard fresh nuances in the song’s lyrics. The central metaphor of collapse, of course, sounded now like a comment on old age or the rural culture that the Troubadour embodied. But falling to pieces is only a response to the song’s central concern—the narrator is really plagued by memory: “You want me to act like we’ve never kissed . . . But you walk by and I fall to pieces.” It is a song about the past, about feelings so intense that they can weaken a person in an instant, out of nowhere. It is a song about the tragic flip side to having deep roots: they can keep you from moving on.

  I took my last steps up to the casket and saw Jim’s emotionless, vaguely plastic face. He looked healthy again, but not himself. He was not meant for lying down. He should be out, living among his memories and helping others create their own. His heroism, and the heroism of all classic country songs, was his persistence. Life can be painful, but it must be embraced. Love can kill us, but there’s nothing better. There are so many forces pushing us into the future whether we like it or not, burying orchards and homesteads under highways and megastores. But the homesteads were still there, they were worth fighting for and singing about. Everything falls to pieces, but don’t act like you’ve never kissed.

  We had a police escort down to the Virginia line, at which point the dark green Econoline van containing Jim’s casket took the lead to Shenandoah Memorial Park. It took ten minutes for the line of cars to make it into the parking lot. Then we gathered around the site by th
e entrance road, just a few yards over from Patsy and Charlie. I recognized people I hadn’t seen in years: the huge man who sang about Jesus at my first karaoke night; Sandy Uttley, whose Patsy tribute CD Jim had recorded and won awards for; Tracie Dillon, a former Celebrating Patsy Cline board member who had spoken in the chapel at this very location for the fiftieth memorial; and Julie Fudge, Patsy’s daughter, back in Winchester for a funeral once again.

  There were few tears. These last months had been hard, and uncertainty loomed about Bertha and the homeplace. The rumor was that she intended to keep the business going at least through the following summer, though everyone knew that a lot could change. The gathering around Jim’s grave site was full of hugs and recollections, and old people pulling grandchildren close to explain the old days.

  Eventually, Pastor Shanholtz called everyone in and pulled a white piece of paper from his leather notebook. It was a typed message from Jim, which he’d asked to have delivered at his burial. Over the quiet rustling leaves and the sound of nearby cars, we heard Joltin’ Jim’s final testimony:

  I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turning gray, and to have my youthful laughs forever etched into deep grooves on my face. So many have never laughed, and so many have died before their hair could turn silver. As you get older, it is easier to be positive. You care less about what other people think. I don’t question myself any more. I’ve even earned the right to be wrong.

  So, to answer your question, I like being old. It has set me free. I like the person I have become. I’m not going to live forever, but while I am still here, I will not waste my time lamenting what could have been, or worrying about what will be. And I shall eat dessert every single day (if I feel like it). MAY OUR FRIENDSHIP NEVER COME APART, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT’S STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART.