The Devil's Dream (43 page)

“I thought it was delicious,” I said sincerely, lighting up a cigarette.

“I see that you did.” Ralph grinned at my empty plate. “I'll cook for you sometime,” he said. “I'm a great cook.”

“I know that,” I said. “What's your favorite thing to cook?”

“Beans,” he said right away. “I put a little sausage in them, a coupla onions, maybe a little hot pepper. You ought to keep some beans going all the time.” I remembered how Lucie used to do that, too, and then Little Virginia, on the back of the stove in the big house.

We were both smoking cigarettes by then, and looking at each other through the blue smoke that curled up to the wood ceiling, while the waitresses hustled around setting up for lunch. The sun coming in through the window felt warm on my face. I smelled ham and coffee. Our knees were touching, and I curled my foot around his like I'd been doing it all my life. I felt like I had known him all my life.

Ralph Handy moved into my house on Harding Place three days later, and we got married as soon as we could. He got along great with Don and Rhonda, and also with Annie May and Louisiana and Tommy, who became the drummer in the new band Ralph put together for me. This was the tightest, best band I ever had, with Ralph on steel, Tommy on drums, Mooney Yates playing the banjo, Frosty Duke on bass, and a fine young fiddler from east Tennessee. It was clear from the word go, without anybody saying it, that Tom Barksdale was not going to produce me anymore, and so I eventually signed with RCA. That's who recorded “Shoes.”

I wrote “Shoes” because of something a girl said to me at the beauty shop one day while we were both in there getting our hair streaked, which takes forever. She said that her ex-husband had called up to ask her something about the kids, and then he just came right out and asked her if she'd been sleeping with other men. She said she wouldn't give him the satisfaction of an answer one way or the other, but wasn't that awful? She said he thought that no one else could fill his shoes. It rang in my head when she said that, the way a song will. Well, we all talked about her situation that day in the beauty shop, and then about two days later I sat down and started writing.

Due to the big success of “Shoes” we bought a farm out in Brentwood and moved everybody on out there, none too soon as it turned out, because Ralph's daughter Shirley wanted to come up to live with us, too, since she hated this yoga instructor her mamma was with, and so of course we said yes. Then Ralph's son James and his wife Susan and their little boy Ricky Lee moved up from Texas—James is a soundman—and so we built them a house out at the farm, next to Don and Rhonda's. After I had the twins, we hired a full-time nanny named Ramona Smoot and converted the old tobacco barn into a house for her to live in. Ralph put in a pond so he could go fishing whenever he wanted. Then Don got interested in Arabian horses, so we had this special barn built and bought six of them. I admit I love to see them running around out in the field in front of the house looking pretty, but I wouldn't ride a horse on a bet. They are too big.

We got an interior decorator to come out and help us do over the house, and by the time he got done with it, it was just beautiful! They wrote it up in the Nashville
Tennessean
, in
Nashville Homes
, and even in
Southern Living
. The only thing Ralph said, before the decorator started in on it, was that he wanted one room just for
him
that would stay undecorated, and have a reclining chair and a big TV and a refrigerator in it, so that's what he got!

Ralph and me were both just as interested in our new bus, because in this business you're on the road as much as you're at home. So we had it customized to our specifications, with a little kitchen in the back where Ralph would whip up all kinds of things for me and the boys. It relaxed him. He used to like to drive the bus himself, too, though we had a driver to do it. Many's the night I sat up in the front with Ralph, watching America roll by, and many's the night I lay with him in our special-built king-size bunk in the back, feeling the distance pass under us all night long, falling asleep in one state and waking up in another. The first year we had that bus, we put 250,000 miles on it. Then we took a kind of a break from touring long enough for me to have the twins and record the
Roots
album, and then we were back on the road again. Lord! It seemed to me that our life was like that endless highway, only the older I got, the faster we seemed to be traveling along it. I wished I could slow things down. I wished I could go back and travel some of those miles over again.

I remember saying something of the kind to Ralph one time, it was when I was pregnant with the twins. We were in bed on the bus, driving through the desert headed somewhere. I forget where we were going. I couldn't sleep. I sat up just for a minute and pushed the blinds up to look out at the flat silver desert drifting by. Moonlight came in through the space in the blinds and lit up Ralph's dear face.

“Honey?” I said. “Honey?”

“Hmmm?”

I could tell he was nearly asleep. But the moonlight—or maybe just being pregnant, or something—had filled me with the most awful feeling, a feeling of time passing, of sorrow ahead. “Honey?” I said. “Will you love me when I'm old?”

“What?”

“When I'm old, Ralph. When you're old. Will you love me then?” I was crying.

“Katie-bird,” Ralph said very solemn, feeling of my stomach, “as God is my witness, I will love you when you're old. I will love you till the end of the world,” he said.

I felt better then. I tried to explain. “The thing that kills me is, I just wish we were both real young right now, honey, and had our whole lives ahead of us. I wish we were just starting out. I wish I could go back and meet you when I was eighteen, and live all those years with you. You know what I mean?”

Good old Ralph. He'd bring me back down to earth every time. “But you can't do it, sugar,” he said then. “It don't work that way. The only way you can go is straight ahead, full-tilt boogie. There ain't no other way.”

So that's the way we went, Ralph and me, and it was fine.

But we didn't get to grow old together.

Ralph and his son James were both killed in a head-on collision outside Knoxville in a patch of the thick Tennessee River fog which that stretch of road is famous for. Ralph was driving the bus, and James was sitting up there keeping him company. I was sound asleep in the back. So were Mooney and Frosty, and the others were playing poker. I woke up at the moment of impact, when the semi truck ran into us with a crash so loud I thought it was a bomb dropping—this was the first thought that ran through my mind. But then we were going down the bank backward, and then we were rolling, and I was flung out through the window.

I'm not sure how long I lay there passed out. When I came to, I was laying on my back in wet grass looking straight up at the sky, where oddly enough I could see stars—the brightest, prettiest stars—just for a minute before the drifting fog and smoke covered them up.

You couldn't breathe. You couldn't see twenty feet in front of you. I was on a slant, and somehow I had a sense of the big river on down there below us, though I couldn't see it. A lot of people were yelling, but I couldn't see them either, only here and there a light or a flare through the fog, and then all of a sudden there came this tremendous explosion, this awful burst of flame which lit up the whole night, and I knew it was the bus, the bus blazing all over, end to end, I could see its outline in the flames.

And now lots of people were yelling, there seemed to be more people, though I still couldn't see them. I couldn't see
anything
but the brilliant burning bus, and I have been seeing it ever since, it burns like that forever in my heart.

Somehow I made my way over there closer to it, but they grabbed me and made me stay back. Nobody could get close to the bus. The heat was awful. By then there were sirens and blue lights everyplace, and somehow Mooney was there too, holding me back, but I kept screaming for Ralph and asking them,
Has anybody seen Ralph? Has anybody seen Ralph?
An awful, chemical smell was coming from the burning bus, that made everybody draw back and cough.

I don't know how much later it was when they got the fire out, more or less. By then I guess I was crazy. I broke free of Mooney and stumbled up to the bus, which you could see better now in the flares they had set all around. It lay on its side, the driver's side, like a big terrible toy. “Ralph!” I was screaming. “Ralph!” I burned my feet and legs on the metal before they could catch me and pull me back.

But I knew then.

I stayed there for hours and hours. I refused to leave until they had gotten Ralph and James out, which was well into the day I know now, though I had lost all sense of time. It seemed like there were hundreds of people down there by then, maybe there were.

When it got light you could see that the semi truck had gone all the way down in the river. Its driver, Sam Rasnake from Cookeville, Tennessee, drowned. People said it was a miracle that him, Ralph, and James were the only ones that died in such a collision, but it was not a miracle to me, it was a curse. I wished I had died, too. I stayed there until the crane came and lifted the bus and they got them out and put them on stretchers, and then I went forward to see.

I had to see.

“Don't let her go up there!” somebody was hollering, but it was too late. Ralph's whole face was gone, he was bloody and black beyond knowing, and the smell was terrible. One arm hung down off the stretcher bed, and there was the hand I had held so many times, and there was the turquoise wedding band we had bought in Gatlinburg, just like this one I'm wearing.

For some reason, I thought to get his ring. Crazy things will go through your mind at a time like that. I reached down for Ralph's hand, but when I touched it, all the flesh came right off and stuck to mine. I started screaming then, and couldn't stop.

You don't think you can live through a thing like that, but you do. You don't have any idea what all you can live through until you have to. And me, I was supporting about fifteen people not counting my band,
so I had to
.

I had to work.

When you get right down to it, there's not much in this life that we've got any choice about, is there? It is amazing what all a person can take, and still go on. I don't know what I would have done without my family, or my fans.

Little Virginia came over here for a while to help Don and Rhonda, and they handled everything—the funeral, which I cannot even remember, the burial out at the farm.

I insisted on having Ralph buried by the pond, where he loved to fish, and where I can look out my bedroom window and see his grave. Of course now we've put in the memory garden all around the grave, so that makes it a very special place for me, and also it is nice for the children and for the fans. When the tour buses come in the turn-around, they always point out Ralph's memory garden. It is nice to be remembered. It is nice to have a memorial.

And I'll tell you, not a single hour of a single day goes by that I don't remember Ralph, and what a fine man he was, and how good he was to me. And fun?
Lord!
Ralph was
fun
, and a woman has got to have some fun in this life too, though many of us get precious little, it seems to me. I just wish every woman in the world could take a hit of what I had.