Moonlight & Vines (21 page)

I went outside and sat down on the step and I cried, not caring if my makeup ran, not caring who could hear or see me. But nobody was there anyway and nobody came. I looked out at those lonesome pines after a while, then I got into my rented car again and drove back to the city, pulling off to the side of the road every once in a while because my eyes got blurry and it was hard to stay on my own side of the dividing line.

After I finish my duet with Lonesome George, I just grab my bag and my guitar and I leave the theater. I don't even bother to change out of my stage gear, so it's Dolly stepping out into the snowy alley behind the
Standish, Dolly turning up the collar of her coat and feeling the sting of the wind-driven snow on her rouged cheeks, Dolly fighting that winter storm to get back to her little one-bedroom apartment that she shares with a cat named Earle and a goldfish named Maybelle.

I get to my building and unlock the front door. The warm air makes the chill I got walking home feel worse and a shiver goes right up my spine. All I'm thinking is to get upstairs, have myself a shot of Jack Daniel's, then crawl into my bed and hope that by the time I wake up the buzzing in my head'll be gone and things'll be back to normal.

I don't lead an exciting life, but I'm partial to a lack of excitement. Gets to a point where excitement's more trouble than it's worth and that includes men. Maybe especially men. I never had any luck with them. Oh, they come buzzing around, quick and fast as the bees I got humming in my head right now, but they just want a taste of the honey and then they're gone. I think it's better when they go. The ones that stay make for the kind of excitement that'll eventually have you wearing long sleeves and high collars and pants instead of skirts because you want to hide the bruises.

There's a light out on the stairs going up to my apartment but I can't even find the energy to curse the landlord about it. I just feel my way to the next landing and head on up the last flight of stairs and there's the door to my apartment. I set my guitar down long enough to work the three locks on this door, then shove the case in with my knee and close the door behind me. Home again.

I wait for Earle to come running up and complain that I left him alone all night—that's the nice thing about Maybelle; she just goes round and round in her bowl and doesn't make a sound, doesn't try to make me feel guilty. Only reason she comes to the side of the glass is to see if I'm going to drop some food into the water.

“Hey, Earle,” I call. “You all playing hidey-cat on me?”

Oh that buzz in my head's rattling around something fierce now. I shuck my coat and let it fall on top of the guitar case and pull off my cowboy boots, one after the other, using my toes for a boot jack. I leave everything in the hall and walk into my living room, reaching behind me for the zipper of my rhinestone dress so that I can shuck it, too.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see Hickory sitting there on my sofa. What does surprise me is that she's got Earle up on her lap, lying there content as can be, purring up a storm as she scratches his ears.
But Hickory always did have a way with animals; dying didn't seem to have changed that much. I let my hand fall back to my side, zipper still done up.

“That really you, Aunt Hickory?” I say after a long moment of only being able to stand there and stare at her.

“Pretty much,” she says. “At least what's left of me.” She gives me that considering look of hers, eyes as dark as ever. “You don't seem much surprised to see me.”

“I think I wore out being surprised 'round about now,” I say.

It's true. You could've blown me over with a sneeze, back there in the Standish when I first saw her, but I find I'm adjusting to it real well. And the buzz is finally upped and gone. I think I'm feeling more relieved about that than anything else.

“You're looking a bit strollopy,” she says.

Strollops. That's what they used to call the trashy women back around Piney Woods, strumpets and trollops. I haven't heard that word in years.

“And you're looking pretty healthy for a woman dead fifteen years.”

Maybe the surprise of seeing her is gone, but I find I still need to sit me down because my legs are trembling something fierce right about now.

“What're you doing here, Aunt Hickory?” I ask from the other end of the sofa where I've sat down.

Hickory, she shrugs. “Don't rightly know. I can't seem to move on. I guess I've been waiting for you to settle down first.”

“I'm about as settled down as I'm ever going to be.”

“Maybe so.” She gives Earle some attention, buying time, I figure, because when she finally looks back at me it's to ask, “You remember what I told you back when you first left the hills—about never doing something you'd be ashamed to look back on?”

“Sure I do. And I haven't never done anything like that neither.”

“Well, maybe I put it wrong,” Hickory says. “Maybe what I should have said was, make sure you can be proud of what you've done when you look back.”

I don't get it and I tell her so.

“Now don't you get me wrong, Darlene. I know you're doing the best you can. But there comes a point, I'm thinking, when you got to take stock of how far your dreams can take you. I'm not saying you made a mistake, doing what you do, but lord, girl, you've been at this singing for twenty years now and where's it got you?”

It was like she was my conscience, coming round and talking like this, because that's something I've had to ask myself a whole pile of times and way too often since I first got here to the city.

“Not too damn far,” I say.

“There's nothing wrong with admitting you made a mistake and moving on.”

“You think I made a mistake, Aunt Hickory?”

She hesitates. “Not at first. But now . . . well, I don't rightly know. Seems to me you've put so much into this dream of yours that if it's not payback time yet, then maybe it is time to move on.”

“And do what?”

“I don't know. Something.”

“I don't know anything else—'cept maybe waiting tables and the like.”

“I see that could be a problem,” Hickory says.

I look at her for a long time. Those dark eyes look back, but she can't hold my gaze for long and she finally turns away. I'm thinking to myself, this looks like my Aunt Hickory, and the voice sounds like my Aunt Hickory, but the words I'm hearing aren't what the Hickory I know would be saying. That Hickory, she'd never back down, not for nobody, never call it quits on somebody else's say-so, and she'd never expect anybody else to be any different.

“I guess the one thing I never asked you,” I say, “is why did you live up in that old cabin all on your ownsome for so many years?”

“I loved those pine woods.”

“I know you did. But you didn't always live in 'em. You went away a time, didn't you?”

She nods. “That was before you was born.”

“Where'd you go?”

“Nowhere special. I was just traveling. I . . .” She looks up and there's something in those dark eyes of hers that I've never seen before. “I had the same dream you did, Darlene. I wanted to be a singer so bad. I wanted to hear my voice coming back at me from the radio. I wanted to be up on that big stage at the Opry and see the crowd looking back at me, calling my name and loving me. But it never happened. I never got no further than playing the jukejoints and the honky-tonks and the road bars where the people are more interested in getting drunk and sticking their hands up your dress than they are in listening to you sing.”

She sighed. “I got all used up, Darlene. I got to where I'd be playing
on those dinky little stages and
I
didn't even care what I was singing about anymore. So finally I just took myself home. I was only thirty years old, but I was all used up. I didn't tell nobody where I'd been or what I'd done or how I'd failed. I didn't want to talk to any of them about any of that, didn't want to talk to them at all because I'd look at those Piney Woods people and I'd see the same damn faces that looked up at me when I was playing my heart out in the honky-tonks and they didn't care any more now than they did then.

“So I moved me up into the hills. Built that cabin of mine. Listened to the wind in the pines until I could finally start to sing and play and love the music again.”

“You never told me any of this,” I say.

“No, I didn't. Why should I? Was it going to make any difference to your dreams?”

I shook my head. “I guess not.”

“When you took to that old guitar of mine the way you did, my heart near broke. I was so happy for you, but I was scared—oh, I was scared bad. But then I thought, maybe it'll be different for her. Maybe when she leaves the hills and starts singing, people are gonna listen. I wanted to spare you the hurt, I'll tell you that, Darlene, but I didn't want to risk stealing your chance at joy neither. But now . . .”

Her voice trails off.

“But now,” I say, finishing what she left unsaid, “here I am anyway and I don't even have those pines to keep me company.”

Hickory nods. “It ain't fair. I hear the music they play on the radio now and they don't have half the heart of the old mountain songs you and me sing. Why don't people want to hear them anymore?”

“Well, you know what Dolly says: Life ain't all a dance.”

“Isn't that the sorry truth.”

“But there's still people who want to hear the old songs,” I say. “There's just not so many of them. I get worn out some days, trying like I've done all these years, but then I'll play a gig somewhere and the people are really listening and I think maybe it's not so important to be really big and popular and all. Maybe there's something to be said for pleasing just a few folks, if it means you get to stay true to what you want to do. I don't mean a body should stop aiming high, but maybe we shouldn't feel so bad when things don't work out the way we want 'em to. Maybe we should be grateful for what we got, for what we had.”

“Like all those afternoons we spent playing music with only the pines to hear us.”

I smile. “Those were the best times I ever had. I wouldn't change 'em for anything.”

“Me, neither.”

“And you know,” I say. “There's people with a whole lot less. I'd like to be doing better than I am, but hell, at least I'm still making a living. Got me an album and I'm working on another, even if I do have to pay for it all myself.”

Hickory gives me a long look and then just shakes her head. “You're really something, aren't you just?

“Nothing you didn't teach me to be.”

“I been a damn fool,” Hickory says. She sets Earle aside and stands up. “I can see that now.”

“What're you doing?” I ask. But I know and I'm already standing myself.

“Come give your old aunt a hug,” Hickory says.

There's a moment when I can feel her in my arms, solid as one of those pines growing up the hills where she first taught me to sing and play. I can smell woodsmoke and cigarette smoke on her, something like apple blossoms and the scent of those pines.

“You do me proud, girl,” she whispers in my ear.

And then I'm holding only air. Standing there alone, all strolloped up in my wig and rhinestone dress, holding nothing but air.

I know I won't be able to sleep and there's no point in trying. I'm feeling so damn restless and sorry—not for myself, but for all the broken dreams that wear people down until there's nothing left of 'em but ashes and smoke. I'm not going to let that happen to me.

I end up sitting back on the sofa with my guitar on my lap—the same small-bodied Martin guitar my Aunt Hickory gave a dreamy-eyed girl all those years ago. I start to pick a few old tunes. “Over the Waterfall.” “The Arkansas Traveler.” Then the music drifts into something I never heard before and I realize I'm making up a melody. About as soon as I realize that, the words start slipping and sliding through my head and before I know it, I've got me a new song.

I look out the window of my little apartment. The wind's died down, but the snow's still coming, laying a soft blanket that takes the sharp edge off everything I can see. It's so quiet. Late night quiet. Drifting snow quiet. I get a pencil from the kitchen and I write out the words to that new song, write the chords in. I reread the last lines of the chorus:

But my Aunt Hickory loved me,
and nothing else mattered
nothing else mattered at all
.

There's room on the album for one more song. First thing in the morning I'm going to give Tommy Norton a call and book some time at High Lonesome Sounds. That's the nice thing about doing things your own way—you answer to yourself and no one else. If I want to hold off on pressing the CDs for my new album to add another song, I can. I can do any damn thing I want, so long as I keep true to myself and the music.

Maybe I'm never going to be the big star the little girl with the cardboard suitcase and guitar thought she'd be when she left the pine hills all those years ago and came looking for fame and fortune here in the big city. But maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe there's other rewards, smaller ones, but more lasting. Like knowing my Aunt Hickory loves me and she told me I do her proud.

If we look at the path, we do not see the sky.

—Native American saying

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—

—Emily Dickinson

“Spare change?”

The crowd eddies by on either side of me as I pause. It seems pointless, doling out a quarter here, a quarter there, as if twenty-five cents can make that much of a difference in anyone's life, but I can't stop myself from doing it, because it does make a difference. It means we're at least paying attention to each other, acknowledging each other's presence.