Sacred Country (41 page)

He said: ‘I’m not at Mountview. So don’t say another fucking word.’

He’s dreaming all right. He’s told himself Timmy’s going to
change his mind about the farm. He believes that when Teviotts is over Timmy and Pearl will come back to Suffolk and take on the farm.

I don’t know where we’ll live, Sonny and I.

I think he may be building a nuclear fallout shelter for us in his head, connected to an electricity cable and a sewage pipe. We’ll sleep in bunks: Sonny and Wolf underneath, me above.

I say nothing more about Delusion. Sonny says: ‘It’s obvious. Work it out. He’ll want a proper home for his bride. And this is where her roots are, too. She’ll need to be near Swaithey. Think about it. It’s the only logical course for them to take.’

I remind him the world isn’t logical. That’s the insurmountable object in the way of human happiness.

Sonny doesn’t reply. He stares at me, looking me over. He says: ‘Are you going to get something done about your hair before the wedding? You can’t go looking like that.’

I had it cut and permed. I thought, as it was all being rolled up on hard curlers like bones, Ava Gardner never had a perm. Not that I recall. Did she?

I looked neat and old. I looked a generation older than I was.

On The Day, the Fourth of July, in the very early hours, before Irene was up and ironing the dress one last time, before Timmy was awake and saying his prayers, I had an orgasm.

Nothing and no one touched me, except in a dream. But the orgasm was real and I woke up in the middle of it and cried with pleasure.

I couldn’t remember the dream. And I couldn’t remember when I’d last had an orgasm. It might have been in 1966 when I was in love with Bobby Moore, Captain of England.

We had a Teviotts student staying with us. His name was Julian. He was very tall, with white knuckles. He reminded me of a bamboo. He was going to be Timmy’s best man.

There were no bridesmaids. Just Billy, dressed as a page in breeches, carrying the train, smiling. The only woman taking part in the ceremony was Pearl. And when we heard the rustle
of the twenty-one yards of satin we all turned and stared and an absolute hush fell on us as we recognised the most beautiful bride this side of every ocean.

She was on Edward’s arm. She smiled up at him. I heard the squeak of taffeta as Irene searched for a hankie.

But it didn’t go as planned.

Half-way down the aisle, Edward collapsed. He fell sideways, tugging Pearl with him. He hit his head on a pew. Pearl fell on top of him, almost obliterating him with her dress. She screamed. Billy turned pale and covered his mouth with the train.

I stayed where I was, staring. Irene and Sonny and Timmy went running back.

I thought, I saw this once before: something terrible happen among satin and net. It was in the Girl Guide hut.

The wedding march went on for a few bars, then stopped. My father was standing next to me, wearing a white peony in his button hole. He took my arm. He said: ‘Hold on, Est.’

Edward was carried out into the porch. Pearl was crying. The bamboo stood by the altar, swaying.

I sat down. I felt worn out. I thought, that orgasm wore me out before this day even began.

‘Is he dead?’ I said to Cord.

‘Almost certainly not,’ Cord replied.

The vicar walked past us, his head high. He’s a proud man with no grace. Timmy is all humility and gentleness compared to him. It could be that only one of them believes in Jesus.

‘I’d better go and see,’ I said.

Cord and I held on to each other. The smell of the perming solution is still on my hair and makes people close to me gag.

We found Edward alive and sitting up on a stone bench.

Irene and Billy had their arms round him. Pearl was kneeling by him wiping her tears with her veil. Timmy and Sonny looked on gravely. The vicar stood by, clasping and unclasping his hands. Beyond the porch the July sun shone on the grass and on all the old tilting tombstones.

Edward was apologising. He said: ‘I only fainted once before and that was on the cricket field. Only once before …’

‘Don’t try to talk, Edward,’ said Irene.

‘No. Don’t try to talk, Dad,’ said Billy.

‘Don’t talk,’ said Pearl, weeping.

‘It was the heat,’ said Edward, disobeying his whole family, ‘that’s all it was. That and nerves. I’ll be fine in a moment, Pearl, and we’ll have another run at it.’

‘No,’ said Irene. She stroked Edward’s wild white hair. There was a cut on his forehead where it had hit the pew.

Cord said: ‘I’d take it easy, old chap.’

I said nothing. I felt too tired to speak. But I was glad Edward was alive. He’s one of the few people in this place we would all mourn.

‘I’ll stand in for you, Dad,’ said Billy. ‘I’ve always wanted to give Pearl away.’

We all smiled.

Pearl got up off her knees. Her dress with the seven hundred tiny pearls was marked and dusty.

Irene said: ‘We’ve got to get this cut seen to.’

Edward was driven home. Irene, Pearl and Billy went with him. I felt sorry for Tim.

We all sat in the cool church waiting. The organist played us some Bach.

Tim and the bamboo knelt together, praying.

I thought, it’s a good thing it’s summer and not likely to get dark. I closed my eyes. I heard a voice near me and it said: ‘Mother …’

I opened my eyes immediately. I looked all around. But she wasn’t there, of course. She is in the past. It’s only in rare moments like these, when you have to wait for the present to carry on, that she slips into my mind …

It carried on eventually.

Billy led Pearl down the aisle. Her train followed, dragging on the floor. Edward sat in the pew with Irene, wearing a bandage round his head.

You could see Billy Harker grinning through the back of his
head. He gave Pearl to my son and the vicar pronounced them man and wife.

I choked on the smell of my perm and on the sweet singing of the choir.

‘They’re babes,’ I said to Cord. ‘Lost in a wood.’

‘Hush, Stelle,’ he said. ‘Give them a chance.’

Bentwater Bliss lived in a motor home. He told Walter: ‘I long ago sold the motor, but that’s what I still call it.’ It had its own mail-box on a birchwood post. It was number 315 in a trailer park. The trailer park was situated between a drive-in bank and a Garden of Rest. Bentwater said: ‘You cash in your chips; then you call it quits!’

The motor home reminded Walter of Pete Loomis’s bus. He thought it remarkable that the two people who believed in his singing both lived in motor vehicles that couldn’t move. He described the trolley bus to Bentwater, how it had no electricity and how, at dusk, the heifers clustered round it. Bentwater shook his head. ‘Goddamned England!’ he said.

Bentwater had a plan. When he heard Walter sing he knew he was hearing something good, so the plan came into his head straight away: he would make himself Walter’s agent. Walter had the voice but he, Bentwater, knew the town. Together they would get rich.

He waited and listened and let time pass. Then he said to Walter: ‘Okay, Walt. This is the darn plan. We write songs till they’re coming out of our bones. We hire some pickers. We cut a demo tape. Then it’s Vietnam: saturation bombing. We knock on every door on Sixteenth Avenue. We napalm the record companies and the radio stations. We wake up the whole of Nashville. And all I’ll take is twenty per cent.’

Walter went home to 767. He thought of it as home now. It was spring and the shade trees were coming into leaf. In front of 767 were two redbuds. In a single weekend they’d exploded into flower, just like Pete had said they would. The flowers were bright raspberry pink, the colour of Cleo’s rayon bed-sheets.

He told Audrey and Bill C. that Bentwater Bliss was going to be his agent. Audrey said: ‘There are genuine real agents in Nashville, dear. Why don’t we get a name and have you go on over and see one of them?’

‘They don’t know me,’ said Walter. ‘They won’t work for me. Bentwater will work for me.’

‘He’ll work for you,’ said Bill C., ‘then he’ll cheat ya. Simple as that.’

Walter wrote regularly to Pete. He tried to give him a picture of his new life. He described his yard work, the bonfires of the fall, the mending and clearing of winter, the digging and sowing of spring. He listed the things he was given by the women he worked for: jars of pickled beets, slices of pie, watermelons, home-made candy, tins of tobacco, hand-me-down shirts, a putting iron and a box of old fireworks. He said: ‘I’ve felt since I got here that I was in the right place. And now, with the help of Bentwater, whom I trust even though Bill C. doesn’t, I think I shall get to stand up and sing at long last. I shall dedicate my first song to you. I haven’t forgotten Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman or writing “Oh, Sandra” when I thought I was in love. If it comes right, I’ll owe it all to you.’

He didn’t write to Grace.

He thought about her. He was glad that every one of her days was safely ended soon after his had begun. He let her birthday pass. When he became a singer he’d send her his news. He would write: ‘You have a famous son.’

The first time he sang to an audience was at a funeral.

The deceased was a woman of sixty-two named Mrs Riveaux. She wasn’t going to be buried in any Garden of Rest
but under a giant magnolia tree on her farm near Franklin. Bentwater explained: ‘She loved that ’ere land and she liked the music of the country. She was a pure Tennessee woman. She could even dance.’

Her husband was a circuit judge, to whom Bentwater owed his life. This was why Bent and Walter were going to sing at Mrs Riveaux’s funeral, because the Judge never forgot the people he’d saved. He knew that a person who needs saving once may need saving over and over.

‘How did he save you, Bent?’ asked Walter.

They were in the motor home, drinking beer. The little electric refrigerator kept kicking in and making a vibrato humming.

‘He saved me by having me work for him on the farm,’ said Bentwater. ‘I was up before him on a vagrancy charge. I’d been sleeping in a pile of sand. Living off garbage. Stealing tobacco. He could have sent me down but he didn’t. He had me come out to the farm and work there for bed and board. I slept in what once was the slaves’ cabin. I think my mattress still had the body fluids of slaves steeped into it ’cause it smelled like it was a person. But it was better than sand.

‘And Miz Riveaux, she was kind to me. She give me clothes to wear. I never knew whose they’d been. She give me a razor and soap and one-day-old newspapers. And I used to sing for her and the Judge. In summer. We used to sit out on the porch with no light ’cept the mosquito flares, singing.’

‘How long did you stay there?’ asked Walter.

‘Oh, a year maybe. Till I got sick of the sight of the sky. I’m not cut out for living on a farm.’

‘Nor was I,’ said Walter.

‘I mean, it’s okay for a while and then you just mainly tire of it.’

‘Yes. You do.’

‘I knew Fay May by that time. She gave me a break in the Lounge, singing for the jar money. I bought me an old car and lived in that. Parked it near the heap of sand, so as I could see where I’d once been. I ain’t no Nietzsche nor Wittgenstein,
Walter, but one thing I do think and that’s this, if you don’t know the place where y’all been you could wind up back there and not recognise it and when that happens you are purely in shit creek. You are going round in a friggin’ circle, an’ that’s tragic.’

The Riveaux were Baptist. The funeral was in a small white church standing on its own in the middle of Riveaux land.

Walter wrote to Pete:

It had a garden – lawns and beds – and I said to Bent: ‘My uncle was once a church gardener in Memphis,’ and he said: ‘No kiddin’, Walt?’

Mrs Riveaux’s coffin was ebony. It looked large to me so I think she must have been tall. There was a ton of flowers.

I had to go and buy a suit for the funeral and I bought a black leather tie on a string. Bentwater wore lizard boots but I just wore some plain shoes.

The Reverend talked about the good woman Mrs Riveaux had been while she was alive and how she and the Judge loved all living creatures, including the negroes and the poor and the hogs in the field. He made her sound like a female Jesus. He said the Riveaux farm was a place of beauty in a devastated world.

Bent introduced me as his new singing partner. He wasn’t going to mention the agent business in front of a funeral congregation. He said I’d come all the way from Suffolk, England, because of my love of song.

I played the guitar and Bent played the mandolin. We led the hymns. The mourners sang loud, as if they all belonged to the Sally Ann.

Then we did two songs composed by Bent that were Mrs Riveaux’s favourites. We’d worked out some lovely harmonies. And I could see lots of the mourners crying. The titles of Bent’s numbers were ‘Bird in the Sky’ and ‘Down in My Yard There’s a Creek that Flows to Heaven’.

We didn’t go to the burial. That was a private thing, under a magnolia. But before we left, the Judge came and
shook my hand. He said: ‘Welcome to Tennessee. I’ll say prayers for your success in your chosen task.’ I thought the word ‘task’ was a bit peculiar, but I expect you remember that lots of words here have different meanings from the ones we’re used to giving them.

By the time of Mrs Riveaux’s funeral, Walter’s repertory of songs for the demo tape was almost complete. He saved every cent he could save from his yard work for the day when he and Bent would hire session musicians and studio time and cut the tape. He thought of this day as a boulder. He was in a cave (quite an enjoyable cave where it was warm in winter) and the boulder was lying across the exit. It didn’t fit exactly. You could see light around it and weather. You could hear storms.

He described the boulder to Audrey Pike. He said: ‘I’ve got my eye on it most of the time.’

She said: ‘All I wish is, Walter, that you weren’t putting your trust in Bentwater Bliss.’

He had to shrug this off. No one had trusted Pete Loomis except him. And Bentwater had become his mentor and guide. Without him and all the hours spent in the motor home he could have lost direction by now. He could have resigned himself to a life spent raking leaves.