Composed (13 page)

I had composed a chorus for a song called “Rules of Travel” years earlier, and though I had tried dozens of different melodies for the verses, I could never make it work; I could never even find exactly what I wanted to convey in the verses. Hearing me struggling with the song yet again, John finally said, “This is one of the best choruses you’ve written. You have to finish it.” We finished it together, and decided it would be the title of the album.

While driving on the Long Island Expressway a few years before, in a haze of anxiety about my dad, who was then suffering yet another health crisis, I had written the lyrics to “September When It Comes” and put them in my purse. Eventually that piece of paper found its way to the third floor of our brownstone, where John picked it up. “What is this?” he asked. “This is really good.” He took the lyrics and wrote the melody, a mournful and exquisite piece of music.

I recorded “September When It Comes” when we came back to the project after the return of my voice. Listening to the completed track pensively, John observed, “You really should ask your dad to sing on this with you, as a duet.” I demurred, and when he brought the idea up again a few weeks later, again I declined. Several months passed and John said, “If ever there was a song or a time to do a duet with your father, this is the song and this is the time.” I suddenly knew he was right.

I called my dad and said, “Dad, I have this song, and I was wondering if you’d sing on it.”

He was silent for a moment and then said, “I’ll have to read the lyrics first.” I laughed and told him I’d deliver them in person.

I flew to Nashville with the lyrics and the audio files, and after reading the words to the song, he nodded. “I could do this,” he said quietly. He knew it was about his own mortality, about closing the door on the past, about what can never be resolved, only endured.

We went over to the cabin in the woods near his house, where he had his recording studio, accompanied by my brother, John Carter, who would record Dad’s vocal. Dad clearly wasn’t feeling well at all, so I gave him an out: “Dad, you don’t have to do this. We can do it another time.”

“No,” he said firmly. “I want to try it.”

As he learned the song, he got stronger with every take. I stood listening on the other side of the glass of the vocal booth, tears rolling down my face. We recorded three separate takes, and then he said, “You take that back to New York, and if John says it isn’t good enough, I’ll do it again.”

“It’s good enough, Dad,” I told him, laughing. “I promise you.”

When Al Gore spoke at Dad’s funeral on September 15, six months after the record was released, he mentioned the song in his eulogy and its strange prescience. “It’s September,” he intoned, and nodded at me.

W
hen I was a child, I remember sitting in my fourth-grade Catholic school class and figuring out how old I would be at the turn of the century. It seemed unlikely to me then that I would live to be as old as forty-five at the dawn of the new millennium, not to mention absolutely inconceivable that I had a future as a middle-aged woman. I nonetheless placed those figures in my mental files and kept them there safely for years. In about 1998 I retrieved my childhood estimates and was startled to realize that my ten-year-old self had not allowed for the fact that I wouldn’t turn forty-five until May of that year, so I would actually be forty-four on January 1, 2000. I felt an unsettling ripple reach backward in time, to my fourth-grade classroom, freeing both my current and childhood selves. Having realized that I had been operating on a false premise for over thirty years, I now felt a palpable sense of relief. Maybe some of the other burdens I had carried from the past into my adult life had also been based on equally false assumptions, and maybe I could review some of them now, find a fatal flaw in my logic, revise my prospects for the future, make my way through my personal mazes, and put away some of my regrets and obsessions. It was never too late to undo who you had become.

My earliest memory, perhaps the earliest possible flawed template for my life, dates to when I was around two years old. We were visiting my mother’s parents in San Antonio, and my grandfather, Tom, the bespectacled insurance agent, master amateur magician, renowned rose breeder, and champion gin rummy player, took me to the park to feed the pigeons. He was sitting on a green bench, tossing seeds from a bag to the birds, which were flocking around his feet. He kept saying, “Look at the birds, Rosanne!” and I thought to myself, with a sharp clarity that I now spend most of my waking hours trying to recapture,
Oh, I am supposed to pretend to be excited. I am supposed to act like a child.
And so I did. I squealed obligingly, feigned alarm at the gathering birds, and pleased my grandfather. It was a bad way to start things off, actually—a compelling need to please people can be deadly.

In 1961, when we lived in Los Angeles, my father and I both suffered from respiratory problems. Even then, the air pollution there was significant, and that was why he’d decided to move us north to Casitas Springs, where the air was crystal clear and desert clean. I don’t think he even noticed how miserable the little town itself was, so pleased was he with the idea of owning his own small mountain, with absolute privacy and a desert climate. The only problem was that by the time he had the big ranch-style house built and moved us in, he was spiraling into his own extended experiment in chaos, self-destruction, and addiction, as well as constantly traveling.

Once, when I was about nine years old, my dad accidentally set fire to the mountain with a spark from the tractor he was riding. I called the fire department myself and said in the most adult and calm voice I could manage, “I just want you to know that Johnny Cash’s house is on fire.” The woman’s voice at the other end replied, very formally, “We’ve received the message.” For years I wondered whether she had given me the formal, scripted, official response to every report of a fire, or whether a dozen—or twenty, or fifty—people who lived down below in Casitas Springs, obviously delirious with excitement from the sight of the entire mountain in flames and the prospect of a celebrity’s house being consumed at any moment, had already notified the fire department, and the woman, weary from the flood of calls, had formulated a rote response that was short and to the point. I remember the feel of the smoke in my lungs that lingered for days afterward: the sensation of heaviness in my chest, the trouble and pain it caused me to take a breath. From my current perspective, with Mom and Dad dead and my sisters scattered to every far corner of the country and everyone who’d ever lived in Casitas Springs in the 1960s surely dead or relocated, I think that if I had had the presence of mind as a nine-year-old, I would have told Dad to just finish the job, burn the whole mountain, and save us all a lot of unnecessary psychic torment on that lonely, arid, snake-infested hillside.

In 1979, I checked my guitar, a Martin D-28, at the curb at LAX on my way to Hawaii to begin my honeymoon with Rodney, which had been delayed for three weeks while I was finishing my first album for Columbia. I waited at the little outdoor baggage claim in Lihue for my guitar to come off the carousel, but it never did. Rodney became alarmed even earlier than I did, and began saying, “I don’t think your guitar is going to show up.” Even when it was clear that it was missing, even after we had filed the missing luggage report, I still felt fairly confident that it would appear. Thirty-six years later, I am still waiting for that guitar to turn up. It had been a gift from my dad, who had inserted a handwritten note into its sound hole saying something to the effect that it was a present from him to me, his daughter, with love, along with the date.

Somewhere, someone has my guitar and knows damn well it belongs to me. Since the advent of the Internet, I have made halfhearted attempts to find it. I have alerted my friend Matt Umanov, of the legendary eponymous guitar store in Greenwich Village, to the style, color, and year of the instrument, and he has promised to keep a lookout. I have an illogical but certain belief that my guitar will be returned to me before I die, even if I am ninety years old and have only a week to live. I just know I will see that guitar again. I am counting on it. If my dad, from his perch in the other world, wanted to do something really great for me, he might hasten its return. I’m sure he knows where it is by now.

I went to so many funerals over the course of six months in 2003 that I eventually developed a relationship with the directors of the funeral home in Hendersonville, Tennessee, where my father, my stepmother, my stepsister, and my aunt were dressed and laid out before they were buried in the cemetery right across the parking lot. I spent a lot of time in those offices, making decisions with my siblings about the color of caskets, the wording of obituaries, the size of headstones. Weight of heart. Look of future. Lack of answers.

One horrible day in a long string of horrible, macabre days that year, while I was walking down the wide hall between the individual “parlors” of the funeral home, one of the directors stopped me to inquire about my own plans for the disposition of my body after my demise, and whether they might “take care of me,” since they now had such an enduring professional relationship with my entire family.

“No, thank you,” I replied, shuddering. “I’m not going into the ground. I want to be cremated.”

He became instantly alert and focused. “Would you like to be a diamond?”

“Excuse me?”

“There’s a lot of new technology. You can have your body reduced to carbon and turned into a diamond.”

I paused. “Let me ask my daughters if one of them would be interested in wearing me around her neck, and I’ll let you know.”

At June’s funeral I wore a black Jil Sander suit with a knee-length skirt and collarless jacket, one of the most expensive items of clothing I had ever purchased. I had bought it a few months earlier under the assumption that I would be wearing it to my dad’s funeral, as he was back in the hospital and we were all frantic with worry. Dad recovered, so I wore the suit, along with black satin Prada shoes and a black satin wide-brimmed hat, to bury June.

I carried one of her old handbags as I delivered her eulogy in the cavernous modern Baptist church in Hendersonville:

Many years ago, I was sitting with June in the living room at home, and the phone rang. She picked it up and started talking to someone, and after several minutes I wandered off to another room, as it seemed she was deep in conversation. I came back ten or fifteen minutes later, and she was still completely engrossed. I was sitting in the kitchen when she finally hung up, a good twenty minutes later. She had a big smile on her face, and she said, “I just had the nicest conversation,” and she started telling me about this other woman’s life, her children, that she had just lost her father, where she lived, and on and on. . . . I said, “Well, June, who was it?” and she said, “Why, honey, it was a wrong number.”

That was June. In her eyes, there were two kinds of people in the world: those she knew and loved, and those she didn’t know and loved. She looked for the best in everyone; it was a way of life for her. If you pointed out that a particular person was perhaps not totally deserving of her love, and might in fact be somewhat of a lout, she would say, “Well, honey, we just have to lift him up.” She was forever lifting people up. It took me a long time to understand that what she did when she lifted you up was to mirror the very best parts of you back to yourself. She was like a spiritual detective: She saw into all your dark corners and deep recesses, saw your potential and your possible future, and the gifts you didn’t even know you possessed, and she “lifted them up” for you to see. She did it for all of us, daily, continuously. But her great mission and passion were lifting up my dad. If being a wife were a corporation, June would have been the CEO. It was her most treasured role. She began every day by saying, “What can I do for you, John?” Her love filled up every room he was in, lightened every path he walked, and her devotion created a sacred, exhilarating place for them to live out their married life. My daddy has lost his dearest companion, his musical counterpart, his soul mate and best friend.

The relationship between stepmother and children is by definition complicated, but June eliminated the confusion by banning the words “stepchild” and “stepmother” from her vocabulary, and from ours. When she married my father in 1968, she brought with her two daughters, Carlene and Rosie. My dad brought with him four daughters: Kathy, Cindy, Tara, and me. Together they had a son, John Carter. But she always said, “I have seven children.” She was unequivocal about it. I know, in the real time of the heart, that that is a difficult trick to pull off, but she was unwavering. She held it as an ideal, and it was a matter of great honor to her.

When I was a young girl at a difficult time, confused and depressed, with no idea of how my life could unfold, she held a picture for me of my adult self: a vision of joy and power and elegance that I could grow into. She did not give birth to me, but she helped me give birth to my future. Recently, a friend was talking to her about the historical significance of the Carter Family, and her remarkable place in the lexicon of American music. He asked her what she thought her legacy would be. She said softly, “Oh, I was just a mother.”

June gave us so many gifts, some directly, some by example. She was so kind, so charming, and so funny. She made up crazy words that somehow everyone understood. She carried songs in her body the way other people carry red blood cells—she had thousands of them at her immediate disposal; she could recall to the last detail every word and note, and she shared them spontaneously. She loved a particular shade of blue so much that she named it after herself: “June-blue.” She loved flowers and always had them around her. In fact, I don’t ever recall seeing her in a room without flowers: not a dressing room, a hotel room, certainly not her home. It seemed as if flowers sprouted wherever she walked. John Carter suggested that the last line of her obituary read: “In lieu of donations, send flowers.” We put it in. We thought she would get a kick out of that.

She treasured her friends and fawned over them. She made a great, silly girlfriend who would advise you about men and take you shopping and do comparison tastings of cheesecake. She made a lovely surrogate mother to all the sundry musicians who came to her with their craziness and heartaches. She called them her babies. She loved family and home fiercely. She inspired decades of unwavering loyalty in Peggy and her staff. She never sulked, was never rude, and went out of her way to make you feel at home. She had tremendous dignity and grace. I never heard her use coarse language, or even raise her voice. She treated the cashier at the supermarket with the same friendly respect that she treated the president of the United States.

I have many, many cherished images of her. I can see her cooing to her beloved hummingbirds on the terrace at Cinnamon Hill in Jamaica, and those hummingbirds would come, unbelievably, and hang suspended a few inches in front of her face to listen to her sing to them. I can see her lying flat on her back on the floor and laughing as she let her little grand-daughters brush her hair out all around her head. I can see her come into the room with her hands held out, a ring on every finger, and say to the girls, “Pick one!” I can see her dancing with her leg out sideways and her fist thrust forward, or cradling her autoharp, or working in her gardens.

But the memory I hold most dear is of her two summers ago on her birthday in Virginia. Dad had orchestrated a reunion and called it Grandchildren’s Week. The whole week was in honor of June. Every day the grandchildren read tributes to her, and we played songs for her and did crazy things to amuse her. One day, she sent all of us children and grandchildren out on canoes with her Virginia relations steering us down the Holston River. It was a gorgeous, magical day. Some of the more urban members of the family had never even been in a canoe. We drifted for a couple of hours, and as we rounded the last bend in the river to the place where we would dock, there was June, standing on the shore in the little clearing between the trees. She had gone ahead in a car to surprise us and welcome us at the end of the journey. She was wearing one of her big flowered hats and a long white skirt, and she was waving her scarf and calling, “Helloooo!” I have never seen her so happy.