Cash: The Autobiography (4 page)

think that's changed. It hadn't in the '60s when I wrote and recorded “What Is Truth?” and it hasn't today. So I simply don't buy the concept of “Generation X” as the “lost gen- eration.” I see too many good kids out there, kids who are ready and willing to do the right thing, just as Jack was. Their distractions are greater, though. There's no more simple life with simple choices for the young. Jack has stayed with me. He's been there in the songs we sang at his funeral—“Peace in the Valley,” “I'll Fly Away,” “How Beautiful Heaven Must Be,” all of them— and those songs have sustained me and renewed me my whole life. Wherever I go, I can start singing one of them and immediately begin to feel peace settle over me as God's grace flows in. They're powerful, those songs. At times they've been my only way back, the only door out of the dark, bad places the black dog calls home. Jack comes to me in person, too. He's been showing up in my dreams every couple of months or so, sometimes more often, ever since he died, and he's been keeping pace with me. When June or John Carter or other members of my family appear in my dreams, they're usually younger than they are now, but Jack is always two years older than me. When I was twenty, he was twenty-two; when I reached forty-eight, he was fifty already; and the last time I saw him, about three weeks ago, his hair was gray and his beard was snowy white. He's a preacher, just as he intended to be, a good man and a figure of high repute. He's still wise, too. Usually in my Jack dreams I'm having some sort of a problem or I'm doing something questionable, and I'll notice him looking at me, smiling, as if to say, “I know you, J.R. I know what you've really got in your mind....” There's no fooling Jack.

Cinnamon Hill has its own spirits, pres- ences, and very personal memories. From the spot where I sit at this moment, on the veranda at the north end of the house, shaded by jasmine, z8o feet above sea level, I'm just a few feet away from the quiet, gentle room in which I recuperated from my most profound encounter with the medical profession, emer- gency bypass surgery in 1988. It's the room through which people have been going to ground during hurri- canes ever since the house was built in 1747, and what's now its bathroom was designed as both a hurricane shel- ter and a windbreak. Constructed of limestone four feet thick in the shape of a round-edged, slope-roofed wedge pointing north, into the hurricane winds, it directs the fiercest forces of the storms down the sides and up over the top of the house. It's very effective and, as far as I know, unique; I've never seen another like it anywhere in the world. John Carter's young wife, Mary, has painted the interior walls with tropical fishes. Even closer to me, right at my feet, is another mem- ory, the skin of the rogue crocodile I killed back in 1976, eleven feet and 560 pounds of very tough, dangerous old creature, One-Eyed Jack we called him in his prime. I put three bullets from a rusty .30-30 into his brain—good shooting, even if I do say so myself, over open sights in the dark—until he quit thrashing around and we were able to drag him into the airboat with us, where of course he came right back to life. Not a good moment, that. My friend Ross Kananga, a full-blooded Seminole and the professional in the affair, had to shoot him another five times with a pistol before he went quiet forever. We did the local wildlife a big favor that night, and we, too, benefited. Crocodile tail meat is delicious when

you cut it in thin slices, roll it in meal and spices, and fry it like fish. I don't regret killing One-Eyed Jack, but I don't kill anything anymore. I just don't want to. A lot has been created on this veranda, in this spot. Billy Graham wrote parts of three of his books here, and it's one of my own favorite writing places. And then of course it's possible that some of the descendants of the Barretts—die Barretts of Wimpole Street, the family of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the original owners of the property—wrote some of their journals, prose, and poetry here. Certainly they experienced life here, and death; many of them are entombed in their own private cemetery in a lovely spot down the hill from the house, one of my favorite places in the world. Every one of the men, women, and children buried there lived and died in the house I now call mine. On John Carter's first visit to the cemetery, when he'd just turned four, he said something to June as she opened the gate that she didn't understand at first: “Moma, my brother Jamie is here.” She was mystified, but then, as she was looking around, she bent down to read the smallest of all the tombs, one of those heartbreakingly tiny memorials you always know at a glance marks the grave of a young child. The stone was worn on one side, so she couldn't make out the last number in the birth and death dates, but the first three numbers of both were 177-, and die young Barrett's Christian name was James. She still didn't understand, but there it was, and there it is today. Perhaps we were meant to come here. I certainly felt a powerful tug when I first saw the house in 1974.1 was rambling around the hills in a four-wheel drive with John Rollins, who owned the house and all the land

around it, including Rose Hall, the greatest of all the great houses. As soon as we came up on Cinnamon Hill I fell in love with it. It was in disrepair but basically sound—a playboy was living there in just one room, with one electric light and one maid—and immediately I got the idea that I could renovate it into a wonderful vacation home. John thought that was a good idea, too, but he wouldn't consider selling it to me; he wanted it for himself in later years. If I wanted to fix it up, he said, I should go ahead and do that, and I could use it when- ever I wanted. I went ahead, and by the end of 1975, ** was ready for our first Christmas in Jamaica. I'd never liked the idea of living in someone else's house, though, and at that point I really didn't like it. I badly wanted to own the place myself. By that time John Rollins and I had become good friends. We'd taken to each other on first meeting, being of like mind and similar roots—he too came from the cot- ton fields; he'd had the same kind of life in Georgia as I'd had in Arkansas—and so he'd shared some of his secrets with me. The relevant one was about his approach to closing a really big deal, which is something he does well. He was already a very successful businessman in 1975, and he's come a long way since then. He operates in a financial sphere way beyond mine; last time I checked, his umbrella company owned about two hun- dred enterprises, everything from billboards in Mexico to truck lines in the United States to security services all over the world. For a while he was lieutenant governor of Delaware, his home base today. I'm godfather to his son Michael. To close a deal successfully, he told me, he'd put on his dark suit—his “sincere suit,” he called it—and make his pitch, and when he was done he always said, “And if we can do that, I sure would appreciate it.”

Now, I don't own a “dark suit,” and didn't then, and all-black outfits in the Benjamin Franklin or riverboat- gambler style, my favorite kind of dress-up outfit at the time, are anything but “sincere suits,” so I left out that part of the formula when I sat down on the porch with John right after Christmas. “You know, John, I spent a lot of money on this place this year,” I began. “I've got more invested in it than I should for just a place to come once in a while for a nice vacation. We've hired people to work here, got the place fixed up, got the grounds fixed up. We're about to put in a swimming pool. I think it's time you sold me this place.” “No,” he said. “I can't do that.” He still wanted it for himself. I pressed. “Well, we've just about got to have this place.” Still no deal. “You've got it every time you need it. Just come on down,” he said. “Look, John, you know better than that. It just wouldn't be right to do it that way. I wouldn't feel right, fixing it up and having it still be yours. We've got our hearts here now. We've gotten dirt on our hands around here. We love this place. We need to buy it from you.” “I don't know....” he said. “Well, say you sold it. If you did, what would you have to have for it?” He told me his figure. Bingo. We were into it now. I was halfway there, at least. I thought about his price, concluded that it had some give in it, and made him my

offer. Then I looked him straight in the eye and said, as soberly and sincerely as possible, “If we can do that, John, I sure would appreciate it.” He stared at me for a second, then started laughing. “All right,” he said, “we've got a deal.” And so we did, and so June and I began the process of merging our lives with that of our new home. The past is palpably present in and around Cinnamon Hill, the reminders of other times and other genera- tions everywhere, some obvious, some not. For more than a century this was a sugar plantation worked by thousands of slaves who lived in clusters of shacks all over the property. All that remains of those people now, the metal hinges from their doors and nails from their walls, lies hidden in the undergrowth on the hill- sides or in the soil just below the manicured sod of the golf course that loops around my house. I doubt that the vacationers playing those beautiful links have any idea, any concept, of the kind of life that once teemed where they walk—though perhaps some do, you never know. I've been out with a metal detector and found all kinds of things. A lot has happened here. There are ghosts, I think. Many of the mysteries reported by guests and visitors to our house, and many that we ourselves experienced, can be explained by direct physical evidence—a tree limb brushing against the roof of the room in which Waylon and Jessi kept hearing such strange noises, for instance. But there have been incidents that defy conventional wisdom. Mysterious figures have been seen—a woman, a young boy—at various times by various people over the years. Once, a woman appeared in the dining room when six of us were present. We all saw her. She came through the door leading to the kitchen, a person in her early thirties, I'd say, wearing a full-length white dress, and proceeded across the room toward the double doors in the opposite wall, which were

closed and locked. She went through them without open- ing them, and then, from the other side, she knocked: rat- tat-tat, rat-tat. We've never had any trouble with these souls. They mean us no harm, I believe, and we're certainly not scared of them; they just don't produce that kind of emo- tion. For example, when Patrick Carr was staying here, working with me on this book, he was awakened in the middle of the night by a knock on the door next to his bed—rat-tat-tat, rat-tat—and was struck by the thought, Oh, that's just the ghost. Don't worry about it. Go back to sleep. He didn't even mention the incident until the fol- lowing evening, after we'd told him—for the first time— about the lady we'd seen in the dining room and that same knock we'd heard. At that point his wife revealed that she'd had the identical experience: same knock, same reaction. They'd both interpreted the event as such a nat- ural occurrence that they hadn't even told each other about it. So we're not frightened. The only really frightening story about Cinnamon Hill belongs in the realm of the living and serves to remind me that some of them—just a few of them, a tiny minority—are much more dangerous than all the dead put together. The dark comes down. Here I sit in the Jamaican twilight with sad memories, somber thoughts. Every night about this time, as dusk settles in, we go around the house and close and lock all the doors. Carl does it, or I do it myself. The doors are massive: thick, solid mahogany from the local hills of two and a half cen- turies ago, mounted into the limestone walls in 1747. They've survived a lot: hurricanes (by the dozen); slave rebellions (including the general uprising in 1831 that destroyed most of the other great houses on the island);

even the occasional earthquake. They're secure. The pres- ence of the guards, always at least two of them during the hours of darkness, makes them more so. The guards aren't family, but I trust the private security company they work for. One call to their headquarters from the walkie-talkie I keep at my bedside, and we could have an army up here. After our house was robbed we did have an army up here, literally. The prime minister was very upset—and of course concerned that we might flee Jamaica for good and create tourist-discouraging publicity—so he ordered fully armed units of the Jamaican Defense Force into the woods around our house until it was time for us to go back to the United States. I've never talked at length about the robbery in pub- lic, or even among my friends. June has told the story in her book From the Heart, and she's been the one to tell it on other occasions. The way she and I are together, she does most of the talking when we're in company; I listen. It's interesting, isn't it, how two people's recollection of the same event can differ in so many ways? I don't know how many times I've heard June and the others talk about the robbery—well, it wasn't just a robbery, it was a vio- lent home invasion—and I've found myself thinking, / didn't know that, I didn't feel that, I don't remember it that way. I'm not saying that June's wrong and I'm right, just that people's experiences and memories are so subjective. It makes you wonder about the whole idea of “historical fact.” I mean, I just finished reading Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose's wonderful account of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and I really enjoyed it. But I was aware of how the other works I've read on that subject, some of them very authoritative and most of them based on Clark's journals, differed not just in detail and interpre- tation, but in matters of basic chronology and geography:

what happened where, when, in what order, to whom. And once you get into the writings of other Lewis and Clark expedition members, events start slipping and slid- ing even more energetically—but everybody, every jour- nal writer out there on the plains in i8zo or back in Washington or talking out his memories in his parlor, is quite certain of his facts. Which of course is only human. Sitting down with pen and paper (or tape recorder and Microsoft Word), the words “I don't remember” and “I'm not sure one way or the other” don't seem adequate, even if they do reflect reality more accurately than what- ever you're about to write. This isn't an original thought, but I do like to keep it in mind. The robbery as I remember it began at exactly six o'clock on the evening of Christmas Day, 1982. The peo- ple at home with me were my wife, June Carter; our son, John Carter; his friend Doug Caldwell; Reba Hancock, my sister; Chuck Hussey, then her husband; Miss Edith Montague, our cook and housekeeper at the time, now deceased; her stepdaughter Karen; Desna, then our maid, now our cook and household manager; Vickie Johnson from Tennessee, working specially for Christmas; and Ray Fremmer, an archaeologist friend of ours. There were no guards; we didn't have guards back then, or locked doors. We were in the dining room, a long, nar- row space that runs the entire width of the house and is almost filled by a table at which twenty people can dine in comfort. We were just sitting down to dinner, about to say the blessing, when they came bursting in: a synchronized entry through all three doors. One had a knife, one a hatchet, and one a pistol. They all wore nylon stockings over their faces. Their first words were yelled: “Somebody's going to die here tonight!” Miss Edith fainted dead away.