Nashville Chrome (20 page)

Once back inside, she naps again, lies down on the couch and sleeps so hard that she doesn't awaken until dusk, and feels completely off-balance. She's slept right through Buddy's afternoon passage, and, she fears, past any phone calls that might have come in. She doesn't have an answering machine and certainly doesn't have the money to spend on one, or the space left in her mind to learn how to use one. She'll just have to hurry a little now when she goes out to check the mail each day.

There's no telling how hard she's slept.
It's probably a little too soon for anyone to have seen the ad,
she thinks, and she tells herself to keep her hopes low, not to expect anything on the first day—but still, she's excited to be putting her longing out there again, just like in the old days. She wonders if the current will pick up that hope just as it did back then, and carry her forward, with no effort at all.

I had a big life,
she thinks, but the thought is hollow; it doesn't attach to anything, not pleasure or pride or even regret, and the thought floats away as if none of it ever happened. The only thing that matters is the waiting, and the possibility of the call. And it is enough.

She boils water for tea. She is too exhausted from the day to fix even a TV dinner—she'll eat tomorrow. She pulls the phone over by her bed, her cot—it has occurred to her on more than one occasion that her hip might not ever feel strong enough for her to get back up those stairs—and as she falls asleep again, she imagines her little scrap of paper up on the bulletin board in the grocery store, and the stream of people moving past it, coming and going, and stopping, often, to look at it.

Someone who knows someone, that's all it takes. The world has never abandoned her. The current was fast, and then it became slow and lazy, and finally no longer discernible. But she has put a leaf onto it now to see if it is moving, and it seems to her that it is.

She falls asleep for the night, and although she awakens the next morning in time to feed Buddy, she is still tired from the rigors of the previous day and it ends up taking her nearly the rest of the week to fully recover, to the point at which soon enough she will have to go out and do it over again. She eats sparingly, trying to make her supplies last longer.

The phone does not ring—not even Jim Ed or Bonnie call—but the silence now is a positive thing. It means only that she's moving that much closer to the point when someone
will
call—this is how it has always worked in the past—and at the end of the week, feeling the old magic begin to stir (
That's it,
she thinks, as she feels for the first time in ages the gentle hand at her back, the subtle and cunning guidance of a fate that wants something from her), she places another ad, mailing this one to an address gotten from an old issue of
Country Music Today,
stating the same particulars and a few more: "Looking for movie producer to make exciting film about country music pioneer Maxine Brown." To figure out how to pay for the one-month ad, she spends an hour scribbling on a notepad, juggling her budget. Her electricity bill is $250 a month, most of which is the air conditioning; a month without it will pay for the ad and bring her the further extravagance of hope.

Not hope; certainty. The world has never let her down before. She has been waiting, but finally it is time to go beyond waiting.

This is how it used to be. Her depression lifts slowly. She has no one to talk to, and on the outside, nothing changes. But she is merrier.
What a miracle,
one would think, noticing the change in her, if there were anyone to notice. A spirit pervades her; it is the spirit of play and hope and careless joy that was in her back in the beginning.

Where does it come from, and why is it in her? Why has it returned? She cannot change the world again; she is done with that, has already changed it. Why then would such a thing return to her now? She called for it and it has come. It did not have to come. It possessed her; she was not in possession or command of it. And yet somehow she has summoned the summons.

It means nothing. Her time is gone; her days are done. But she calls for it, and it arrives, not as if with the certitude of fate, but instead simply as if from habit, its path to and from her in some ways as worn and established as that of the little dog that is now her sole contact with intimacy, companionship, love.

C
HET BROUGHT THEM
their full measure of fame, in exchange for their bringing him their greatness. For three or four years he was able to nurture and develop and perfect them—but part of their greatness was the ultimate unmanageability of the sound. No accompanists could score their harmony—Chet alone came closest, and became adept, almost in jazz fashion, at not joining them with his studio instruments but following them, patiently filling in those spaces he understood, saw, and heard, and with his help their music became even more accessible, without losing its original force.

Television bands were frustrated by them, had never heard or played with anything remotely like their harmony, and stumbled badly when playing live; it was just a little thing, this diminished vigor that attended such performances—a disynchrony between the Browns and their host bands—but eventually it began to result in fewer appearances on television. They didn't care—they preferred radio anyway, and preferred the live performances of touring, playing as they always had with just the three of them.

The wobble was much slower than the ascent had been rapid. Always a harbinger of the approach of the swooping low luck, another of Floyd's restaurants burned down. After the third one had burned he had been unable to find insurance, and had nowhere to turn now but back to the mill. He was too old for such work, but it was all there was. He hired another crew on speculation, and once more he and Birdie moved into the woods—even Norma was grown now, and off at college, studying music, with her perfect voice, but unattached to the tight coil of her older siblings.

Floyd and the crew began sawing again, growling their way farther into the forest, hunting the best and straightest trees again, extending their crude muddy roads farther into the swamp. Even on a bad day it beat the restaurant business—there was less adrenaline and less money, but there was something that remotely resembled peace, even for so unsettled a spirit as Floyd's—and it brought him some satisfaction also to know of his children's improbable success. Of his own part in that success, he was able in moments of sobriety to acknowledge that although he had been a little hard on Maxine when she was growing up, neither his or even Birdie's loving support had had anything to do with eliciting or forming that greatness. It was just a freak thing: they had been in the right time at the right place. Some force had simply wanted it to happen and had instilled the talent as well as the fire in each of them. It had next to nothing to do with Birdie and Floyd, and while he would like to have claimed to have had some hand in the matter, he couldn't.

There were times when Floyd was almost cowed by the force. It had been benevolent, but still, the immensity of it could be intimidating. He had noted long ago that the people who were drawn to it were not frightened, but on the contrary, bold, even courageous. Maybe too much so. A little caution, a little restraint, wasn't always a bad thing.

The early 1960s were nowhere nearly as kind as the 1950s had been. Another of their musician friends, Ira Louvin, was killed by a drunk driver. He had been one of the most revered songwriters of the time, and during the time of his crush on Maxine (he'd been in another relationship) had written the classic "I Take the Chance/(to Be With You)" for her. Emmylou Harris would go on to cover a great number of his other songs—"If I Could Only Win Your Love" and others—and "I Take the Chance," when Emmylou Harris recorded it, spent eight weeks at number one, just as it had back when the Browns first recorded it, way back in.

Where is that invisible point where any one man's or woman's power is most fully realized? In which hour does any traveler pass through that point, crossing some indefinable threshold? Do any such travelers recognize or even sense that unseen summit?

The gradient is mild, seems no different than all the accruing days that preceded. The ascension of power is for the most part all the traveler has ever known, so that the traveler has no concept of anything but further ascent; as well, the power of denial is strong, so that even if on that one day when certain threads and filaments began to grow slack, a traveler sensitive enough to notice such things would surely tell herself that the reservoir, the capital accumulated in all the days previous, was more than sufficient to carry the traveler and her youthful power beyond any momentary slack spot, any eddy, any resting place.

The traveler sensitive enough to notice the slight pause in power's ascendancy would even tell herself that she was due for a rest, had earned it, and that such a pause was actually good for her, and for the power within. Almost as if the traveler—having all her life desired greatness, and power—was beginning to grow tired of it, gradually weakened by the burden.

Most, however, step through that curtain—that one certain day, that one certain moment—with no recognition that they are passing through a veil. And the more gifted the possessor of power is, the less likely he or she is to notice anything.

And in so doing—in the blithe passage that takes the gift, like youth, for granted—perhaps the going-away, the dissolution, is hastened. Perhaps such travelers pass from young to old with no middle journey.

Most, however, circle back once they realize they are missing something and try desperately to find it again. They don't even realize the burning is gone—that it is now only the echo of the thing that stirs them. That they are no longer chosen.

She is the only one left now, has been the only one left for a long time, and it is a loneliness beyond lonely, in no way commensurate with or proportionate to the pleasure that the greatness brought her.

Bonnie got out, found a graceful way to let the greatness return to the world, as did Jim Ed—a slow, dignified release—but not a wisp of it ever left Maxine. It's simply an unsustainable venture, and there are days when she thinks she, too, will finally explode—that the top of the volcano will explode.

Floyd's ghost leg was bothering him more, not less, but what else could he do but keep on working? He gimped through the woods on his crutches, eyeing the individual trees in the forest, looking for the best and evaluating which direction he would fell them, and planning ahead of time how to get them out of the tight embrace of the forest and back to the mill.

It was when he was in the forest that the pains were deepest, as if it were there that the body most remembered how things had once been, recalling, in the echo of cellular transmission and the cooling neurology of the past, the days when Floyd had been at his strongest—the best days—though the discomfort and even pain was not entirely without recompense; for in the aching and throbbing, and the jolts of pain, it seemed that the leg was still there, so that Floyd was still able to work as he had before. His balance was off but he still felt whole, if flawed and in pain. He built a special chair that fastened to the base of whatever tree he was felling, and he would sit there in it for hours, sawing or chopping steadily.

He might fell only one or two trees all morning in this manner, while the men around him sent theirs crashing down all around him in great numbers; but he was still working, still hunting the best and biggest trees, to keep him and Birdie going, if not the rest of his family, who had grown up now and proven themselves to be capable of making a living on their own.

He wasn't the only Brown to be haunted now by how things had been. Jim Ed was having a hard time accepting the new limitations of his mill-damaged hand—of learning new chords and tempos—though strangely, people remarked that since the accident his voice had gotten even stronger, deeper and more assured. Like Floyd, however, he could feel the pain of what was no longer there, and—mercifully—the slow going-away of the unsustainable power, the gift of the maelstrom with which he had started out.

Birdie, too, moved through the days between two worlds during this time. She loved all her children, but as her own health began to falter, she found herself wondering more, not less, what Raymond, the brightest and funniest of them all, would have been like. Wondering what her days would be like were he still in her life, still in all their lives. She knew that each and all carried a bit of him forward, but it was hard traveling on in that manner. It was worse than missing part of a hand, or a leg, and though she tried to keep her spirits up, she felt herself descending, too.

Whenever the Browns went out on the road, which was often—in, they toured 300 of 365 days, and not one of those days was plush—Maxine left Tommy in charge of the children, but she found out later that he was not watching them, was hiring a babysitter, who wasn't doing a good job either. One of her babies had a broken leg when Maxine got home, and another got scalded by a kettle of hot water. To complicate matters, Tommy was sleeping with the babysitter, and Maxine was no longer able to fully enjoy or concentrate on her shows, wondering if her children were safe, and usually having difficulty in reaching anyone by phone, either before or after a show. She was drinking harder still by this point, but the hits kept coming: not quite as fast as only two years earlier, and not as high—some number fives and sixes and sevens—but still, people were listening to her, people were coming to hear them play.

Floyd had another accident. A tree he was sawing began to lean, but rather than snapping off on the hinge, it pulled the whole rootwad up as it went over and took with it Floyd and his special chair, still strapped to the trunk. It launched him, as if slung from a catapult, into the branches, whereupon landing he was pinned. No other workers were nearby, and he had to cut himself free, his good leg broken badly.