Moonlight & Vines (20 page)

I never could figure out what it was about Hickory that made people feel so damn twitchy around her. Mama said it was because of the way Hickory dressed.

“I know she's my sister,” Mama would say, “but she looks like some no account hobo, tramping the rail lines. It's just ain't right. Man looks at her, he can't even tell she's got herself a pair of titties under that shirt.”

Breasts were a big topic of conversation in Piney Woods when I was growing up and I remember wishing I had a big old shirt like Hickory's when my own chest began to swell and it seemed like it was never gonna stop. Mama acted like it was a real blessing, but I hated them. “You can't have too much of a good thing,” she told me when she heard me complaining. “You just pray they keep growing a while longer, Darlene, 'cause if they do, you mark my words. You're gonna have your pick of a man.”

Yeah, but what kind of a man? I wanted to know. It wasn't just the boys looking at me, or what they'd say; it was the men, too. Everybody staring down at my chest when they were talking to me, 'stead of looking me in the face. I could see them just itching to grab themselves a handful.

“You just shut your mouth, girl,” Mama would say if I didn't let it go.

Hickory never told me to shut my mouth. But then I guess she didn't have to put up with me twenty-four hours a day, neither. She just stayed up by her cabin, growing her greens and potatoes in a little plot out back, running trap lines or taking to the hills with her squirrel gun for meat. Maybe once a month she'd head into town to pick up some coffee or flour, whatever the land couldn't provide for her. She'd walk the five miles in, then walk the whole way back, didn't matter how heavy that pack of hers might be or what the weather was like.

I guess that's really what people didn't like about her—just living the way she did, she showed she didn't need nobody, she could do it all on her own, and back then that was frowned upon for a woman. They thought she was queer—and I don't just mean tetched in the head, though they thought that, too. No, they told stories about how she'd
sleep with other women, how she could raise the dead and was friends with the devil, and just about any other kind of foolish idea they could come up with.

'Course I wasn't supposed to go up to her cabin—none of us kids were, especially the girls—but I went anyways. Hickory played the five-string banjo and I'd go up and listen to her sing those old lonesome songs that nobody wanted to hear anymore. There was no polish to Hickory's singing, not like they put on music today, but she could hold a note long and true and she could play that banjo so sweet that it made you want to cry or laugh, depending on the mood of the tune.

See, Hickory's where I got started in music. First I'd go up just to listen and maybe sing along a little, though back then I had less polish in my voice than Hickory did. After a time I got an itching to play an instrument too and that's when Hickory took down this little old 1919 Martin guitar from where it hung on the rafters and when I'd sneak up to her cabin after that I'd play that guitar until my fingers ached and I'd be crying from how much they hurt, but I never gave up. Didn't get me nowhere, but I can say this much: whatever else's happened to me in this life, I never gave up the music. Not for anything, not for anyone.

And the pain went away.

“That's the thing,” Hickory told me. “Doesn't matter how bad it gets, the pain goes away. Sometimes you got to die to stop hurting, but the hurting stops.”

I guess the real reason nobody bothered her is that they were scared of her, scared of the big dark-skinned cousins who'd come down from the rez to visit her sometimes, scared of the simples and charms she could make, scared of what they saw in her eyes when she gave them that hard look of hers. Because Hickory didn't back down, not never, not for nobody.

I fully expect Hickory to be no more than an apparition. I'd look away, then back, and she'd be gone. I mean, what else could happen? She was long dead and I might believe in a lot of things, but ghosts aren't one of them.

But by the time the boys finish their break and it's time for me to step back up to the mike for another verse, there she is, still sitting in the third
row, still grinning up at me. I'll tell you, I near choke right about then, all the words I ever knew to any song just up and fly away. There's a couple of ragged bars in the music where I don't know if I'll be finishing the song or not and I can feel the concern of the boys playing there on stage behind me. But Hickory she just gives me a look with those dark brown eyes of hers, that look she used to give me all those years ago when I'd run up so hard against the wall of a new chord or a particularly tricky line of melody that I just wanted to throw the guitar down and give it all up.

That look had always shamed me into going on and it does the same for me tonight. I shoot the boys an apologetic look, and lean right into the last verse like it never went away on me.

The longest train that I ever saw
Was nineteen coaches long,
And the only girl I ever loved
She's on that train and gone
.

I don't know what anyone else is thinking when I sing those words, but looking at Hickory I know that, just like me, she isn't thinking of trains or girlfriends. Those old songs have a way of connecting you to something deeper than what they seem to be talking about, and that's what's happening for the two of us here. We're thinking of old losses and regrets, of all the things that might have been, but never were. We're thinking of the night lying thick in the pines around her cabin, lying thick under those heavy boughs even in the middle of the day, because just like the night hides in the day's shadows, there's lots of things that never go away. Things you don't ever want to go away. Sometimes when that wind blows through the pines, you shiver, but it's not from the cold.

I was fifteen when I left home. I showed up on Hickory's doorstep with a cardboard suitcase in one hand and that guitar she'd given me in the other, not heading for Nashville like I always thought I would, but planning to take the bus to Newford instead. A man who'd heard me sing at the roadhouse just down a ways from Piney Woods had offered me a job in a honky-tonk he owned in the city. I'm pretty sure he knew I was lying about my age, but he didn't seem to care any more than I did.

Hickory was rolling herself a cigarette when I arrived. She finished the job and lit a match on her thumbnail, looking at me in that considering way of hers as she got the cigarette going.

“That time already,” she said finally, blowing out a blue-grey wreath of smoke on the heel of her words.

I nodded.

“Didn't think it'd come so soon,” she told me. “Thought we had us another couple of years together, easy.”

“I can't wait, Aunt Hickory. I got me a singing job in the city—a real singing job, in a honky-tonk.”

“Uh-huh.”

Hickory wasn't agreeing or disagreeing with me, just letting me know that she was listening but that she hadn't heard anything worthwhile hearing yet.

“I'll be making forty dollars a week, plus room and board.”

“Where you gonna live?” Hickory asked, taking a drag from her cigarette. “In your boss's house?”

I shook my head. “No, ma'am. I'm going to have my own room, right upstairs of the honky-tonk.”

“He know how old you are?”

“Sure,” I said with a grin. “Eighteen.”

“Give or take a few years.”

I shrugged. “He's got no trouble with it.”

“Well, what about your schooling?” Hickory asked. “You've been doing so well. I always thought you'd be the first one in the family to finish high school. I was looking forward to that—you know, to bragging about you and all.”

I had to smile. Who was she going to brag to?

“Were you going to come to the graduation ceremony?” I asked instead.

“Was thinking on it.”

“I'm going to be a singer, Aunt Hickory. All the schooling I'm ever going to need I learned from you.”

Hickory sighed. She took a final drag from her cigarette then stubbed it out on the edge of her stair, storing the butt in her pocket.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Are you running from something or running to something?”

“What difference does it make?”

“A big difference. Running away's only a partial solution. Sooner or later, whatever you're running from is going to catch up to you again. Comes a time you're going to have to face it, so it might as well be now. But running to something . . . well.”

“Well, what?” I wanted to know when she didn't go on right away.

She fixed that dark gaze of hers on me. “I guess all I wanted to tell you, Darlene, is if you believe in what you're doing, then go at it and be willing to pay the price you have to pay.”

I knew what she was trying to tell me. Playing a honky-tonk in Newford was a big deal for a girl from the hills like me, but it wasn't what I was aiming for. It was just the first step and the rest of the road could be long and hard. I never knew just how long and hard. I was young and full of confidence, back then at the beginning of the sixties; invulnerable, like we all think we are when we're just on the other side of still being kids.

“But I want you to promise me one thing,” Hickory added. “Don't you never do something that'll make you feel ashamed when you look back on it later.”

“Why do you think I'm leaving now?” I asked her.

Hickory's eyes went hard. “I'm going to kill that daddy of yours.”

“He's never tried to touch me again,” I told her. “Not like he tried that one time, not like that. Just to give me a licking.”

“Seems to me a man who likes to give out lickings so much ought to have the taste of one himself.”

I don't know if Hickory was meaning to do it her own self, or if she was planning to put one of her cousins from the rez up to it, but I knew it'd cause her more trouble than it was worth.

“Leave 'im be,” I told her. “I don't want Mama getting any more upset.”

Hickory looked like she had words for Mama as well, but she bit them back. “You'll do better shut of the lot of them,” was what she finally said. “But don't you forget your Aunt Hickory.”

“I could never forget you.”

“Yeah, that's what they all say. But then the time always comes when they get up and go and the next you know you never do hear from them again.”

“I'll write.”

“I'm gonna hold you to that, Darlene Johnston.”

“I'm changing my name,” I told her. “I'm gonna call myself Darlene Flatt.”

I figured she'd like that, seeing how Flatt & Scruggs were pretty well her favorite pickers from the radio, but she just gave my chest a considering look and laughed.

“You hang onto that sense of humor,” she told me. “Lord knows you're gonna need it in the city.”

I hadn't thought about my new name like that, but I guess it shows you just how stubborn I can be, because I stuck with it.

I don't know how I make it through the rest of the set. Greg Timmins who's playing Dobro for me that night says except for that one glitch coming into the last verse of “In the Pines,” he'd never heard me sing so well, but I don't remember it like that. I don't remember much about it at all except that I change my mind about not doing “I Will Always Love You” and use it to finish off the set. I sing the choruses to my Aunt Hickory, sitting there in the third row of the Standish, fifteen years after she up and died.

I can't leave, because I still have my duet with Lonesome George coming up, and besides, I can't very well go busting down into the theater itself, chasing after a ghost. So I slip into the washroom and soak some paper towels in cold water before holding them against the back of my neck. After a while I start to feel . . . if not better, at least more like myself. I go back to stand in the wings, watching Lonesome George and the boys play, checking the seats in the third row, one by one, but of course she's not there. There's some skinny old guy in a rumpled suit sitting where I saw her.

But the buzz is still there, humming away between my ears, sounding like a hundred flies chasing each other up and down a windowpane, and I wonder what's coming up next.

I never did get out of Newford, though it wasn't from want of trying. I just went from playing with housebands in the honky-tonks to other
kinds of bands, sometimes fronting them with my Dolly show, sometimes being myself, playing guitar and singing backup. I didn't go back to Piney Woods to see my family, but I wrote Aunt Hickory faithfully, every two weeks, until the last letter came back marked, “Occupant deceased.”

I went home then, but I was too late. The funeral was long over. I asked the pastor about it and he said there was just him and some folks from the rez at the service. I had a lot more I wanted to ask, but I soon figured out that the pastor didn't have the answers I was looking for, and they weren't to be found staring at the fresh-turned sod of the churchyard, so I thanked the pastor for his time and drove my rented car down Dirt Creek Road.

Nothing looked the same, but nothing seemed to have changed either. I guess the change was in me, at least that's how it felt until I got to the cabin. Hickory had been squatting on government land, so I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to find the cabin in the state it was, the door kicked in, the windows all broke, anything that could be carried away long gone, everything else vandalized.

I stood in there on the those old worn pine floorboards for a long time, looking for some trace of Hickory I could maybe take away with me, waiting for some sign, but nothing happened. There was nothing left of her, not even that long-necked old Gibson banjo of hers. Her ghost didn't come walking up to me out of the pine woods. I guess it was about then that it sunk in she was really gone and I was never going to see her again, never going to get another one of those cranky letters of hers, never going to hear her sing another one of those old mountain songs or listen to her pick “Cotton-Eyed Joe” on the banjo.