by Rick Bass
The eyes of the men watching them, awaiting the verdict. The three children already standing in a line, as if on a stage.
After the children finally detected the harmony, the spinning blade on the round table would slow to a stop. The relaxation on the children's faces would fade, vanishing with the sound itself, and the children would rise and return to the shadier, cooler forest to resume their duties of being children, unseen by and unknown to the world. Playing their guitars. Singing a little. Pretending they were famous.
The men remained behind, attached to the machines. With the blades adjusted, the machines would start back up, coughing and blatting slowly at first, burning either too much oil, through heat- and grit-worn pistons, or not enough, with dust-soaked filters starving the motors. The men would tinker with the engines, adjusting throttles, until the deafening race of the engines was saturating the small clearing and spreading into the damaged forest, shaking the ground with the throbbing, and the howl of the timber being planed to foursquare beams, slabs of lumber falling away in bouncing clatter as the men resumed their attempts at making a living. Shouting at each other to be heard over the roar of the sawmill, but unable to make themselves be heard. Shaking their heads and resorting to crude gestures and, when those failed, shaking their heads further in frustration and waving off even the attempts at communication. Forget it. Heads down, back to the focus on work. The bright leaves of the lumber falling away from the blade like sheafs of hay being cleaved. A fountain of sawdust pluming from the sawblade, whirring gold dust in the sun.
The forest shrilled with the shouting chorus of the insects, which seemed to be endeavoring to imitate the roar of the mill. There were catfish to catch in the swimming holes, squirrels and deer and turkeys for Jim Ed to hunt, and rutted clay roads to explore, either on foot or on bicycles, the tires of which were long-ago worn smooth and multi-patched—but as wonderful as the isolated, suspended world of their childhood was, it was far and away secondary to the world they entered when they heard, or created, the tempered harmony.
The children, with their backs to the mill, walked up the dirt road, talking quietly, conversing earnestly. Walking quietly a little farther on, then—the mill so faint as to be almost inaudible—and in that new silence, and having walked a short ways into that silence, the children would begin to sing, making little attempts at harmonies. They would stumble with the harmony only once or twice, but on the third or fourth redo, they would hit it perfectly, and they would walk a little farther on, raising dust, their voices somehow floating above them, as if coming from somewhere else.
HOW IT IS NOW
THE WORLD, OR the world of country music—the only world she cared about—had surrounded her for maybe ten good years, had swarmed around her and her family, once it was discovered that she and they were the epicenter and nucleus of it, the yearning and voice that gave rise to what would quickly become the highly commercial Nashville music industry.
Then that world went on past, leaving her withered and broken, like the dry husk of a shed insect skin. That part doesn't much matter to her anymore—she has become accustomed to the physical pain and diminishment—but what plagues her is how she has been forgotten. Being forgotten is a thousand times worse than the physical reductions, the body's humiliations and betrayals, and there is still just enough of the old curse that was placed on her almost eighty years ago to keep her wishing for more, wanting more, needing more.
Her wishes are a burnt-out gutted shell of vitreous sear—a lifetime spent burning with a fire, a hunger, no one should be expected to possess—and now that her body is failing, there's no fuel left for the Poplar Creek summons to feed on. It has feasted on her, has long since used up the sweet best of her and moved on, either searching for another or disappeared completely, perhaps, to wait for a while—a generation, or a century—before emerging again; and whether near the original site or much farther on there is no way of predicting.
She is still left with some of the sparks—crumbs of fire that seek to find the last of any fuel she can feed them—but there is no fuel; no one wants her, no one knows who she is or how it was.
She has a house to live in, and Social Security and disability benefits. Most don't even have that. Most don't have anything—country music using up its young entertainers the way nations use up young men for war. Hank Williams dying in his Cadillac, Patsy Cline's plane tumbling from the sky, Buddy Holly's likewise, with Waylon Jennings having given up his seat on that plane, deciding to remain behind.
Why has Maxine survived? And if she had not survived, would she perhaps still be remembered, rather than forgotten?
Her children, while not entirely estranged, are scattered to the winds. They remember her birthday sometimes, but not much more. They are busy with their own lives, and back then, the fire did not allow her to bond to them as she might otherwise have.
They don't blame her for that, exactly—it's just that her identity to them was more of an absence than a presence. She bought the house right before the divorce, and right before running out of the last of what little money there ever was. It's a 1960s-style low brick ranch house in the suburbs of West Memphis, green sloping lawns and shady streets, young suburbanites sudsing and washing their cars on their driveway every weekend.
She's lived in it for more than forty years, and none of the neighbors knows her. They come and go, one generation after the next, in the cycles of raising their children. She is the old lady down the street, nothing more. They wash their cars. They polish the chrome and buff the surface. They smile at her on the rare occasions they see her, lift their sponges and dripping chamois cloths to her and wish her a good day.
She is a recovering alcoholic—one day at a time—and has to have her'S tea, particularly in the morning, and again at that point in the day, usually around four in the afternoon (particularly in the summer, with the days so long) when the light finally begins to lay down its long shadows across the well-kept lawns.
To help hold electricity costs down, she keeps the venetian blinds in her darkened living room closed, and other than the weekly terror of driving to the grocery store (she's almost legally blind, but hasn't had to go in for retesting at the DMV yet), her outings are pretty much restricted to limping behind her clattery aluminum walker out to check the mail. The black plastic wheels scrape on the pea gravel of her front walkway. There's rarely anything in the mailbox other than a promotional flyer from Radio Shack or a circular advertising cell phones.
She returns with great effort and spends the next thirty minutes reading the flyers, pondering the electronic equipment about which she knows nothing.
At that time of the afternoon, when another day has passed, another day without what she once had, she limps back into her kitchen and with shaking hands fixes another cup of tea.
She fell and broke her hip on Christmas, hurrying to answer the telephone—rushing down the stairs, only to have her hip snap to powder-dust, tumbling her to the bottom—and as such she has not been able to make it back upstairs in more than nine months, has been sleeping on her couch downstairs since that time and living out of a box—sweatsuits and jeans, mostly. The best part of her wardrobe remains upstairs, hanging in the closet.
She had it all, in the beginning—a family knit more tightly, for all its flaws and complications, than the interlocked limbs and branches of the forest itself—and then she turned away, was lured away, at first, though once she set out on that path toward stardom, the force pushing her from behind was surely too great for her to have turned back even if she had wanted to, which she never did, and still doesn't.
And if she had ignored the summons? Would she still be enmeshed in the center of a loving family?
You reap what you sow, she thinks, whenever she considers where her children might be at any given point of the day and what they might be doing. Then she moves on from the thought: one of the things she has had to learn in order to stop the drinking is not to traffic in self-pity. She still occasionally engages in b
itterness—the slow, simmering, steady hunger that can crank up into a rolling boil—but self-pity, never. She can't go back and be a mother over again, and she knows also that even if she could, she would probably do it the same way all over again.
More attentive to her needs, really, are her siblings, the other two-thirds of the trio. Bonnie comes down from the Ozarks to visit about once a month. She's so relaxed, so happy, a bright spirit entering the room. Bonnie's happiness is earned—she has passed through the crucible and then somehow stepped away, and survived—and as such, Bonnie possesses a quiet grace.
Maxine can still be cranky, rough as a cob—all the rough internal edges are not yet sanded off her, nor will they ever be—but Bonnie has already passed on through; has become, in essence, the songs that they sang, gliding smooth, light, unfreighted by the world's deeper concerns.
Jim Ed is in Nashville: still working, always working. Amazingly, he's got some miles left in him, can still take a gig anywhere, any time. A county fair, a bar, a tribute album of duets: anything. It's still easier being a man on the road than a woman. It always has been.
She drinks her tea, all day long, and waits. The days and nights pass through her like light through a pane of dark glass. Some of the ache in her is real and some of it is simply an unsatisfied heat. She falls into long reveries that are interrupted only by the teakettle's whistle. She waits for the phone to ring. She lived too much, too high, fame blew through her like a hurricane, she has spent almost fifty years coming down off the high, and is still coming down, but she will not drink. And while part of that stubborn struggle, that decision, is based on character and force of will, part of it is testament to the haunting that still inhabits her, even if so much more faintly now: for if she drinks, there's no way she can be famous again. She has to remain ready, in case the summons returns.
Instead of drinking, she tries to preserve what feels like the last few days of her mortality, her last few hours, and waits, and watches, and yearns for one more chance.
CRAWFISH
THERE WERE BROWN children everywhere, during their growing-up years—five of them, with Maxine the oldest, Jim Ed two years younger, Bonnie five years younger, Raymond, seven years younger, and, later, the baby Norma, twelve years younger than Maxine. The three of them—the trio of the oldest—went almost everywhere together, did everything together, sang and played together, but as Maxine remembers it, the other two, Raymond and Norma, had even better voices, and were luminous, as if selected also, though chosen only for grace rather than the yeoman burden that appeared to have been tasked to the three oldest.
Raymond, who by the age of five was already an incredible guitar player, was also the funniest and sweetest child anyone had ever known, capable with his jokes and impersonations of making any adult laugh—even the most dour, which was usually Floyd—and Norma, as Maxine remembers it, had the most beautiful voice of all of them, was able to sing the tempered harmony with the three older Browns, or solo, with a voice that by itself would stop in his tracks anyone who heard it. Norma's voice would fill a listener from the ground up, as if the listener were a vessel into which she would pour her voice. It filled the listeners quickly, steadily, and once filled, they could not turn away, but would instead keep listening, flooded with warmth and stilled as if by hypnosis for however long she would sing.
The Browns' tempered harmony was soothing, and it healed, for a little while, the wounds of whoever listened to it—but Norma's voice did more than heal wounds. It made people become someone better than they had been before. Wiser, for a short while, and more compassionate and forgiving, more patient. And, always, joyful. There wasn't an ounce of meanness or unhappiness. At such times, it seemed she was nothing but spirit, as was Raymond, while the older trio, for whatever reasons, seemed to have just a little more grit or earth in them. The three older ones were pretty much normal, most folks would say, except for their gift.
On a few occasions, the older trio would separate: Jim Ed going off on his own, or with Raymond and Bonnie out into the garden early to help Birdie, who even then was not in the best of health, had developed diabetes, though she never let it stop her. She kept working, cooking and cleaning and running the household while also juggling Floyd's various personas and voices that might emerge. Floyd was a hard worker himself, but was malleable in his miseries, euphorias, sulls, and generosities. He was a family man at times and a carouser at others. Undecided, unfixed, unattached in the world, roaring through it when he could and creeping through it when he could not.
With Jim Ed, what you saw was what you got. He was neither simple nor stubborn, but was possessed of an easygoing nature, though was also capable of steady focus on whatever task challenged him. A willing workhorse.
As a child, before he got pulled into the music business—swept into it by Maxine—the thing he loved most was fishing. He was drawn again and again to the banks of Poplar Creek, where, even before he was old enough to use a cane pole, he would sit with a length of cotton string tossed into the creek, a scrap of raw bacon tied to one end, and watch like a heron as mud-brown crayfish inched slowly toward it.
He felt an extreme peace in deepening the practice of being cautious. The bacon sent out tiny iridescent ribbons of fat-sheen on the surface of the brown water. He pulled the string in toward the shore a millimeter at a time. An hour could pass in that manner, two hours. Sometimes he got the crawfish, other times not. It didn't matter.
But soon enough Maxine, up on the porch, would shout for him to come back to the house, made uncomfortable by being alone for too long and by not knowing where everybody was, and what they were doing, and what they would be doing next. Always adjusting, tightening a screw here or there. Even midnote in a song, raising the pitch a fraction or dropping it similarly, as if for sheer devilment, or possessed of a force, the amplitudes of which she sought to control or at least stay abreast with—and forcing her brother and sister to follow her, and stay with her.
She went out on the porch whenever they were out of sight for too long. She yelled to Bonnie to come in from the garden and help her with something, or to come play. She called down to Jim Ed at the creek, where he always went if he wasn't with them.
Bonnie would look up from her gardening and—in those days—dutifully attend to Maxine's beckonings. Jim Ed did likewise, rising on cramped knees—the crawdads bolting back into the deeper water—and starting back up the hill. He would rather have stayed a little longer, but it didn't really matter; he could always come back tomorrow.
SNEAKING OUT
SOME PEOPLE SEEM destined for the safe middle, while others appear to be wedded to the extremities of high and low. On their own, Jim Ed and Bonnie were pretty safely in the middle, but once they joined in with Maxine, she took them straight to the upper reaches every time, and then right back down to the bottom, every time. As if their lives had to follow the range of their voices, when they were together.
The youngest brother, Raymond, did not make it as far into history. Floyd and Birdie were having lots of fights in the evenings after the children had gone to bed—misery throughout the tautness of their isolation, their poverty—but Raymond, even at the age of five, helped more than anyone keep things all strung together, with his antics. For this, as well as his general spirit, his older siblings doted on him.
He died when Maxine was twelve. The last time she saw him, he had just trapped and killed an opossum in the henhouse and was chasing her around the house with it. Then he was gone, off into the logging woods with Floyd and Jim Ed.
It was the rainy season, and down in the bottom, the truck got stuck in the mud. Floyd was rocking it back and forth, gunning the engine and slipping, trying to power out, and Raymond was leaning out the window, watching the slick tires spin, when his door popped open and he fell out, just as the truck was sliding sideways.
The truck rolled across him, stopped on top of him, and they couldn't get it off. Jim Ed was ten, and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about
anything.
Maxine was named Homecoming Queen for senior year. She was the most striking girl in the school (Bonnie, still at the middle school, had not quite yet begun to mature), and while there were days when Maxine thought she might be beautiful, there were also days when she was certain she was not, days when everything about her seemed wrong and off: her jaw a millimeter too sharp, her eyes set a fraction too far apart, her eyebrows imperfect, her nose too long, and her family something to be ashamed rather than proud of. As if she could not trust her own first impressions or instincts. There were times when she thought, with amazement, I might really be beautiful; but such thoughts were rare, and they were up at the surface, where they always vanished quickly, possessing the fleeting quality of dreams and as such, unable to be true.
Even after she received the distinction, she had trouble believing there had not been a mistake. She was haunted by the fear that there were votes that had been cast but were somehow missing and would be discovered—what humiliation!—or, worse yet, that those who had voted for her would change their minds and call for a replacement. That even if she had been moderately attractive on that one particular day of the voting, her luster would dim and the honor would be rescinded.
She considered not going to school, in the heart-pounding days immediately preceding the dance, but in the end could not stay away, for the terror of not being there to defend her crown should it come into peril outweighed her fear of losing it at all.
Her fear was not totally ungrounded; there had already been one near miss, when she realized that receiving the honor meant she had to get a new dress to wear for the coronation. She had assumed there was one that each queen wore every year, that the school had several sizes available and loaned them out, like uniforms or costumes—what kind of prize would require the recipient to descend further into poverty? There was no way—she knew without asking—that her family could afford the shimmering royal blue dress she wanted, from the front window display at Harrigan's on Main Street; nor could she afford any other kind. She had tortured herself once already by going in and trying it on—it would need only a little taking-in at the waist—and she had been overwhelmed by the slide of the silk on her bare skin, and the quiet rustle of it, and by the way all of her senses announced to her, for the first time with no ambiguity, I am grown up now.