Johnny Cash: The Life (69 page)

At her dad’s insistence, Cindy had proceeded with longtime plans to marry fiancé Eddie Panetta in California even though it meant missing June’s funeral. Following the wedding, Cindy and her new husband left for Mississippi, where they planned to live. But she was so concerned about her father’s health that, with her husband’s encouragement, she went to Hendersonville to see him. She ended up staying there for months.

By now the elevator had been installed, which Cash used to get from his bedroom to the kitchen and den, but he spent most of his time in his small office, even sleeping there on a special hospital bed. Though he had never been fond of long phone conversations, he was now talking frequently on the phone to old friends.

The saddest part of each day was evening.

“We were sitting in his office one day when the sun was going down and it was getting dark outside,” Cindy says. “He told me, ‘I always get frightened when the sun goes down.’ It was because he couldn’t see anymore. I asked him one time to look at me and tell me what he saw. I said, ‘What part of me can you see?’

“He said, ‘I see a light around you showing me the shape of you.’”

When Cindy realized her father couldn’t see her face, she broke down.

Cindy spent many hours reading to him from his favorite books, which he had moved to a nearby shelf. She’d also wheel him outside every day and let him feel the breeze and listen to the birds chattering, especially crows. “He loved being outdoors,” Cindy says. “He once told me he even thought God spoke to him through crows.”

One day, Cash asked his daughter to drive him to the cemetery to visit June’s grave.

Standing over her marker, he started sobbing again. “I’m coming, baby.”

Kathy, who was living in Nashville, also spent numerous days at the house, and Rosanne and Tara flew in for visits when they could.

In the midst of all this, a storm was brewing between some of the children and their parents’ longtime staff, especially Peggy Knight, who had been John and June’s aide-de-camp for decades.

As John Carter spent more time with his father, he began to feel the staff was putting up a wall between him and his dad, ignoring family wishes. Even before his mother’s death, he’d been made to feel increasingly unwelcome by the staff. As the discomfort increased after June’s death, John Carter and Cindy expressed to their father their concerns about Knight and the others. The issue added to what was already an unbearable tension at the house by the lake.

Cash resumed work on the next Rubin-produced album the same week as he contributed to his son’s Carter Family tribute. Over the next few days he recorded such material as Merle Travis’s “Dark as a Dungeon” and the Carter Family favorite “You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone” and an old spiritual “There Ain’t No Grave (Gonna Hold My Body Down).”

The sessions were slow, but Cash was in good hands. Ferguson and John Carter recognized that every line out of Cash’s mouth was a piece of history worth preserving whatever the time and cost. They felt they literally had John’s life in their hands; they were sure the recording was keeping him alive.

After a short break, Ferguson was back at the house the first week in June when old friend Jack Clement stopped by. During the session John suddenly said to Clement, “Cowboy, let’s cut ‘Aloha,’” referring to “Aloha ‘Oe,” an old Hawaiian song of farewell that the pair had been singing together for fun for some thirty years. Clement was game and even played Hawaiian-style slide guitar. Rubin immediately thought of it for the end track of Cash’s next album, much as “We’ll Meet Again” closed
The Man Comes Around.

On June 12, for reasons since forgotten, Ferguson set up some equipment next door in Marty Stuart’s house so Cash could record Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind.” During the session, Rubin called with one of the few suggestions that Cash rejected out of hand: the Frank Sinatra hit “My Way.” Cash wasn’t a Sinatra fan, and he found the statement of personal independence grating. Stuart and the others at the session cheered his decision. It would be the last session for a month.

John went to June’s hometown in Virginia later in the month to celebrate her birthday by performing at a barn dance. While seated in a chair, he spoke to the audience in a weak, barely audible voice, “I don’t know hardly what to say tonight about being up here. The pain is so severe there is no way of describing it. It really hurts.” Two weeks later John was back on the same stage, somehow finding the strength to do seven songs.

Shortly after he returned to Hendersonville, he heard from Vivian, who was in town and wanted to drop by to get his blessings for a book project. Cash was happy to see her, and they had a pleasant visit. Vivian wanted to write a memoir that would tell some of their story, mainly through the mass of letters they exchanged during the Air Force years.

Cash was supportive. “I’ve been thinking about that for the past couple of years,” he said. “I think it’s a great idea.”

Vivian, in her book, said she’d told Johnny that their story might help other women who were going through the same kinds of trouble they had. “I so much want for good to come out of those darkest hours,” she wrote. But she’d warned him, “Some of your fans might be upset by hearing the details of our divorce and what happened.” She quotes his answer: “Like I said, all my fans will read it. They’ll love it. It’s time.” It was the last time she would see him.

Out in California, Rubin continued to look forward to his daily phone visits with John. He was thinking less and less about finding new songs and more about figuring out how to help him.

For some time Rubin had been working with Phil Maffetone, a nationally known author and practitioner in the fields of nutrition, exercise, sports medicine, and biofeedback techniques. His patients had included figures from the worlds of sports, business, and music—from Tom Seaver and Mario Andretti to James Taylor and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He had left his practice in 2002 to become a songwriter, which is how he met Rubin. In exchange for his helping Rubin learn more about fitness and nutrition, Rubin helped Maffetone with his music. About a month after June’s funeral, he told Maffetone and Cash about each other and the pair agreed to meet.

Before flying to Nashville to assess Cash’s condition, Maffetone had what he describes as “a troubling” phone conversation with John’s primary physician, Dr. Terri Jerkins. He introduced himself and asked about the medicines Cash was taking. The answer startled Maffetone. Cash was on around thirty medications.

“I can’t imagine that many unless someone’s in a first-aid state and they’re in the hospital, hanging on for their life,” he says. “But that’s temporary, not a regular basis for months and years. While I’m on the phone, I’m writing this down and I’m thinking, ‘This medicine is clashing with that and that is clashing with another one’; it was a train wreck.”

Maffetone arrived at the house on July 8, a Tuesday, and met with Cash in his office, where he was still confined to a wheelchair, a respirator by his side. Cash looked more helpless than he had just months before in the “Hurt” video.

John was cordial, but, just as he had been when he’d met Rubin for the first time, he was passive, not sure that he could be helped. Billy Graham had been urging him to go to the Mayo Clinic, but Cash didn’t have the strength even to consider it. Rubin had sent others to talk to him—“holistic types,” some in Cash’s camp called them—but Cash hadn’t connected with any of them. It was only out of courtesy to Rubin that he agreed to meet with one more outsider.

Maffetone was surprised to find Cash wearing heavy shoes—“big enough to wear in battle”—and leg braces even though he was in a wheelchair.

“Why are you wearing these things when you’re not even walking?” Maffetone asked Cash, who had no answer.

Maffetone told Cash that he wanted to work with him in many areas, including diet, exercise, and brain function. But first he wanted to get him out of the wheelchair, partly as a way of rebuilding John’s confidence.

“The first thing we want to do,” he told him, “is take those things off and get you moving.”

“I can’t do that,” John replied.

“Yes, you can…one step at a time.”

Maffetone told Cash the reason he couldn’t stand up was that his muscles had been turned off. He needed to reestablish communication between the muscles and the brain, which Maffetone would try to do by massaging the muscles involved.

When Maffetone again asked Cash to take off the shoes and braces, John didn’t respond.

“It was one of those nervous, quiet moments,” Maffetone recalls. “So I bent down and took off the shoes and then the braces and he was still silent. I said, ‘Now we’re going to do some biofeedback so you can stand up.’”

It took a long time, possibly two hours, before Maffetone had Cash’s muscles sufficiently stimulated for him to repeat his request for John to stand up.

Maffetone sensed that Cash was getting annoyed; it was humiliating for him to be helpless and to be told to do something he didn’t think was possible. But finally, with Maffetone’s help, he did stand, if shakily.

“I put my hand on his arm, but I offered no support. He really was standing on his own,” Maffetone says. “He looked around, even though he couldn’t see, and he said, ‘Wow.’ Then I asked him if he was comfortable enough to take a few steps, and he wasn’t. Then I asked him to lift his leg like he was going to take a step and put it forward, and he said, ‘I don’t know if I can do that.’ But he did lift it and he started to move it forward, though he kind of stumbled around.”

Maffetone told John to sit back down so he could work on muscles that enabled the foot to move up and down.

“When John got back up, we went through the same thing again—lifting one leg, then the other—and he ended up taking several steps.”

The next day Cash greeted Maffetone with good news: for the first time in ages, he had been able to shower while standing and without fatigue. As they worked together, Cash took as many as fifteen to twenty steps and even sat on an exercise bike, pushing the pedals for approximately a minute.

For the first time in a month, Cash felt strong enough to record a song the next day, July 11, and again on July 14, the day Maffetone returned to his home in Florida. He left John with a list of exercises to help improve his eyesight and restore feeling in his fingers, perhaps even enabling him to play the guitar again, which in turn could lead him to resume another lost skill, songwriting. He promised to be back in a week.

It was during this period that Tara flew to Nashville for three days and spent virtually every waking minute with her dad. She was saddened seeing him in such immense pain, yet she treasured the closeness. Tara had brought a tape recorder, and she turned it on when she tried to lift his spirits by playing a kind of musical word-association game with him, throwing out a word—“bird”—to see if he could sing a song with the word in it, in that case “Bird on The Wire.”

The exercise went on for several minutes.

“Dad, do you know a fishing song?” Tara asked, and Cash responded by singing, “Gone fishing, there’s a sign up on the door, gone fishing, ain’t a workin’ no more”—“Gone Fishin’,” which he had learned from a Bing Crosby–Louis Armstrong recording while he was in the Air Force.

When he finished, Tara challenged him with “blueberries.”

This time he was stumped, so Tara came up with “cabin.”

That was easy (the spiritual “Lord, Build Me a Cabin in Gloryland,” which he learned from a Bill Monroe recording), but “frog” and “bush” eluded him.

Cash did, however, come up with songs for “rock” (the spiritual “Oh, Mary, Don’t You Weep”), “walk” (not “I Walk the Line,” but the gospel number “He Walks with Me in the Garden”), “knife” (“Wolverton Mountain,” from his Louisiana Hayride days), and “fountain” (the spiritual “There’s a Fountain Filled with Blood”).

At one point he said, “I’m winning, Tara,” and his daughter answered, “I know you are” and immediately stumped him again with “garden hose.”

“He loved the game,” Tara says. “He was such a walking encyclopedia musically.”

Tara watched her father go through the exercises with Maffetone, which gave her hope, but her memory of that visit would be mostly one of heartache at seeing her father so frail.

On the day she left, Tara and her father had breakfast. When they were finished, they stood. Tara hugged him and started to cry. Her father knew exactly what she was thinking and tried to comfort her. “This isn’t the last time you’re going to see me, baby.” But Tara knew it was. “It was just excruciating. He was so sad.”

Continuing to feel that the household staff was not operating in their father’s best interests, John Carter and Cindy urged Cash to fire Peggy Knight, but he resisted. Kathy was neutral. She had issues with Knight and the staff, but she felt the timing was bad; their absence would make her father feel even more alone.

On the morning of July 20, John Carter and Cindy went to their father’s office in another attempt to persuade him to take action.

“Dad, there is something Cindy and I want to talk to you about,” John Carter said.

“Wait!” Cash responded. “First there is something I want to tell you. I’m going to fire Peggy Knight in the morning.”

The next day Cindy listened as her father addressed his longtime housekeeper in his office.

“Peggy, sit down,” he said. “I’m sorry, but you have disrespected my children, my family, and myself. You’re fired.”

Knight protested, but Cash wouldn’t reconsider.

The following weeks were a time of upheaval.

“Peggy’s departure ushered in a period of uncertainty and more unhappiness,” according to Mark Stielper, “as other longtime staff followed her, to be replaced by an ever-changing lineup of nurses and caretakers unknown to Cash, who greatly missed the comfort of routine and familiarity, and who was then obliged to endure the indignities that came with strangers tending to his most intimate needs.” Quoting from “Hurt,” he added, “‘Everyone I know goes away in the end’ had been prophetic.”