Nov 01 2001
Chapter One
The woman turns on the television and flips channels absently, looking for something to pass the evening. The boy is gone for the weekend and she is suddenly aware of the silence in the apartment. She wants the sound of voices to fill up the place, to banish her loneliness.
On the screen Sheryl Crowe is singing a duet with Willie Nelson. The woman starts to change the channel but she changes her mind. The song is Orange Blossom Special, which brings back a tumble of memories. She puts down the remote to listen and recall childhood, a jukebox and later, a boyfriend who taught her to love old country songs.
The song ends and the show turns out to be a tribute to singer Johnny Cash who, the woman remembers now, was reported to be very ill some time ago.
She wonders if Cash is dying, if the tribute is a hurried effort to praise the country legend before it’s too late for him to enjoy it. She feels sadness about that, but she’s also happy because the prospect of a bored, lonely evening has just vanished.
June Carter Cash sings her husband’s classic Ring of Fire, and the woman remembers Johnny’s deep voice on the jukebox in her mother’s restaurant.
She sees the diner’s terazzo floor and the red barstools at the counter. She hears the low roar of the bar rush crowd, still drunk from their night out, some talking and laughing, others arguing, eating steaks and drinking coffee before going home to sleep it off.
On the television, Dave Matthews sings Long Black Veil with Emmylou Harris in haunting harmony, and the woman is transported to the memory of her first love, who won her heart with this very song.
The words are those of a dead man, about the woman who grieves for him.
She walks these hills
in a long black veil.
Nobody knows
No one can see
Nobody knows but me.
More stars sing the songs of Johnny Cash — Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Tricia Yearwood, Mary Chapin Carpenter.
The woman recalls how she once pretended, as a girl, that her father was still alive.
I couldn’t remember his face by then, only his shape — tall and thin, angular, with a mournful slouch. I wanted to see his face again.
It occurred to me that my father may not actually be dead. Maybe he staged his death so he could leave his cares behind and start a new life in another city. I’d heard of men who left their families and were never heard from again. Maybe my father was out there somewhere.
This thought gave me comfort. I remembered my father’s powdered, rouged face in his coffin. It looked unreal, like a wax image. I’d wanted to kiss my father’s cheek goodbye, but my mother had pulled me away angrily, embarrassed. Why?
So I chose to believe that my father was somewhere in America and that someday he might write me a letter or even come to visit.
Who knew? Maybe he had gone to Hollywood and become a star. Maybe I had already seen his face, heard his voice.
Who could he be, I wondered. Clark Gable? Too old. Jimmy Stewart? Closer, but not quite.
Johnny Cash.
Of course.
My father ran away and became Johnny Cash.
We didn’t pay much attention to music at my grandmother’s house. When the kitchen radio was on, it was tuned to the news or the last remaining radio soap opera. So I don’t remember exactly when I became aware of Johnny Cash. He was just there, as if he’d always been there. I remember thinking that he looked like my father.
The woman in front of the television hears The Man in Black and begins to cry. She feels foolish, but the tears refuse to stop.
The summer before I turned seven, my mother sent me to camp for two weeks. I remember that on the first day, I made a beaded Indian bracelet and began taking swimming lessons in the small Minnesota lake at the edge of the camp.
I shared a small cabin with several older girls and a counselor. There was sunshine for awhile but mostly there was rain, which began the morning after I decided that I wanted to go home. I had suddenly realized that my mother was far away and I could not reach her.
Please, I begged the young counselor, please call my mother to come and get me.
The counselor tried to persuade to me to take part in the activities but when I refused and started wailing for my mother, she agreed to make the call. I sniffed and wiped my nose with palm of my hand, hiccupping happily as I waited for the counselor to return. Mom will come for me, I thought, and I won’t have to spend another night in a strange, lonely bed.
I’m sorry, said the counselor when she returned. Your mother says she can’t come.
You’ll get used to it here, she said gently. Give it time.
I understood then that I was a prisoner amid the mud and mosquitoes, and no one cared for me or my suffering, not even my mother. I was alone in the world.
So I cried. I threw myself on my cot, howling through the night and the next day and that night too. Outside the screens, the wind and rain echoed my sorrow. The older girls tried to console me in the dark, but by morning they had lost patience. With disgusted voices they called me a crybaby and left to enjoy their camp activities. I didn’t care.
The counselor brought in the camp director, who sympathized and tried to convince me that camp could be fun if I’d just give it a chance. I would have none of it. There was no fun for me, not when my mother didn’t love me enough to save me from this place.
I had never been away from her before, not even for a night. Mom was my world. I recalled my younger days, after we’d moved to my grandparents’ attic bedroom (leaving my father to his own devices). Sleeping in my mother’s bed, I had burrowed into her soft body and sighed with utter satisfaction. Life was perfect then.
I wanted my mother’s warm bed now, not this cold, damp cot. Where was she? Why wouldn’t she come for me?
On the third morning, I lay on my cot watching the rain, exhausted and desolate. The counselor and director came in and told me that my mother had called.
She was coming to take me home! I sat up, unable to believe my ears.
What?!
You’re mother is coming to take you home, the director repeated with a sad smile.
When? When is she coming?
Any minute, she said. Better pack your bag.
I jumped up and down, hugging them both, tears of joy this time.
Yes, yes, I said, I must pack my bag. Oh, she’s coming, she’s coming… I knew she would! She loves me after all.
The director and the counselor seemed oddly quiet, not at all happy for me, but I didn’t care.
I sat impatiently on the cabin steps with my bag, watching the muddy road that emerged from the pine forest. The rain had dwindled to drizzle. A big, shiny black car floated into the driveway, beaded with tiny drops of water. A strange man in a black suit was driving. Another, identically dressed man got out of the passenger seat, took my bag and opened the back door for me.
My mother was sitting there. I stopped wondering who the men were and clambered into the back seat, rushing into her arms.
Oh, Mom, you came for me! You came! I missed you so much!
I missed you too, she said quietly, running her fingers through my hair. I missed you too.
The man in the black suit put my bag in the trunk and got in the front seat, and as the car turned around, I waved triumphantly to the camp director and counselor standing in the driveway. They waved back without smiling.
I burrowed into my mother’s embrace.
The big car glided through the pines like a boat on a smooth lake. New droplets of water formed on the windows as the rain began again. The windshield wipers squeaked slowly this way and that. But I was warm and dry, and happy. I had my mother back.
I have something to tell you, she said.
Your father died last night.
My father, who lived in a railroad car behind the diner where he worked as a fry cook after we left him, was in the hospital last time I saw him. He seemed to be in the hospital a lot. This last time, my mother had brought him down to the lobby in a wheelchair to see me. Children weren’t allowed upstairs at hospitals in those days.
My father had handed me a jar full of pennies.
Three dollars, he’d said. I was astonished at the weight of the jar.
Three whole dollars?! For me?!
Yes, he said. I’ve been saving it for you.
It was the most wonderful gift I had ever received, better than Christmas, better than birthdays.
Was this before or after my mother came home one day and told me that she had gotten a divorce? I can’t remember. I’d been furious with her for not telling me in advance. Not that I wasn’t aware it was coming. They had been separated for two years after all, but I had expected to be included in a decision this important.
How could you not tell me? I’d shouted.
She had no answer.
Now, a raindrop slid down the window behind my mother. I wondered why she wasn’t crying. Why didn’t I feel like crying? I realized that my mother hadn’t come to rescue me, that my tears had meant nothing. It took my father’s death to make her come for me.
I looked out the window and tried to remember my father’s face but I couldn’t. I thought instead of an old movie about a pauper and a prince. The pauper was a young orphan who took the place of a prince and lived in his castle. The two had many adventures before they were finally reunited and decided to live together in the castle as princes and brothers, happily ever after.
I brightened.
Does this make me an orphan? I asked my mother. I wouldn’t mind becoming a princess who lives in a castle and has adventures, not at all.
Oh, no no! my mother said, scooping me back into her arms.
You still have me, she said. You’ll always have me.
The tears flow freely down the woman’s face. She is middle-aged now. Nearly half a century has passed, and she realizes that she finally got her wish. Her mother is dead now too. She is finally an orphan.
She wonders if she should write a letter to Johnny Cash before it’s too late. Maybe it will cheer him a bit to know about the young girl who decided that he was her father.
The woman glances at an old, black-and-white snapshot that she had recently found and framed. In the photo she is eight years old again, blonde and tan, dressed in her Sunday best, leaning against her grandfather’s big green Chrysler in the sun-speckled afternoon under the elms, smiling with shy confidence.
Mom used to tell me that I looked just like my father. She picks up the photo and studies it, but there’s nothing there that reminds her of his face.
This must have been the summer Grampa died, she thinks, wondering if the snapshot was taken before or after her mother found him lying in the grass, the lawnmower still puttering in front of him. Probably before, she thinks.
The ambulance came and the paramedics carried my grandfather into the back porch bedroom and laid him on the bed.
Mom, when is Grampa going to wake up? I asked my mother after awhile, as she ironed quietly in the next room.
He’s not, she said. He’s not going to wake up again.
Some men in black suits came to take him away later, and a few days after that we went to the funeral. My cousins and I skipped on the gravestones until my mother scolded us.
Then we were home again, in the back porch rooms of my grandmother’s house, and I was talking about my father and looking at my jar of pennies. I thought he must have loved me a lot to give me such a gift.
Three whole dollars, I said to my mother, who looked very tired. He gave me three whole dollars’ worth of pennies, Mom. I’ve never seen so much money!
What about all that I give you? she asked. I give you your clothes and your food. I work hard every day for you but all you can talk about is that jar of pennies.
I gaped at her, shocked.
Your father wouldn’t even get a job to take care of you, did you know that? That’s why I left him. That’s why we have to live with your grandmother.
But he was sick, I said in a small voice.
He was sick because he made himself sick, she said. He died because he didn’t take his medicine, trying to make people feel sorry for him.
The woman grieves again for all the times she felt alone and unknown by anyone, all the times she didn’t have with her father, all the things she never knew about him and he never knew about her. The arguments they never had, the teenage rebellion she spent on her stepfather instead, the protection she never received from all the men she desperately clung to later in life. The love she never felt from her father, except for a jar full of pennies. She wonders what ever happened to the pennies.
That’s when I stopped talking about my father and began to imagine Johnny Cash in his place, she thinks.
She grieves for Cash too, who she imagines watching the tribute from his hospital bed at that very moment, tubed and tied to machines. She thinks, I must write to him, send him this photo of me as a young girl before it’s too late, so he will see me just once, know my story and for a moment, know that I existed. But the thought just makes her weep again.
Suddenly, Johnny Cash himself is on stage with a guitar in his hands and his band behind him, clearly ready and able to sing. His hair is grey, his face swollen with age and illness, but he is standing there in a black suit with no tubes in sight. He says that it’s been 19 months since he’s been on any stage and he looks very glad to be on this one.
The woman doesn’t even notice what song Cash sings — she is too lost in memory, too happy and sad all at once.
This isn’t my father, she thinks. This is Johnny Cash. If I write him a letter and he actually reads it, he will think that I am just another unhinged fan with crazy delusions, and he will throw my photo away.
My father is dead.
The tribute ends with a standing ovation for the country legend, risen from the brink of death. The woman turns off the television. She goes to the bathroom and fills the tub with water, remembering the music as she undresses.
The water is steaming. She eases into it slowly and sits there for a long time. Then she cups hot water with her hands and washes the tears from her face, again and again. She rubs her cheeks and feels dead skin rolling into tiny shreds under her fingers.
She rubs harder, still weeping, rubbing her forehead now, then her chin, her neck and her ears, until all the dead skin is gone and what’s left is pink and new.
