Chapter 7
FIFTEEN YEARS LEFT
Life on the road was dirty and strange. This was the county fair circuit smack dab in the sweaty crack of summer. We were all damp as frogs from sunup to sundown, smelling like the salt dust of the shelled peanuts we lived on.
And I quickly realized I was made for it. I had lived most of my life on the edge of existence like the other musicians.
Hess had a harder time acclimating. She was used to a certain standard of living, and she didn’t say it out loud, but I knew she thought it was all a bit barbaric. The cheap hamburgers and passing the liquor bottle after the shows and taking naps in bus seats while we drove to the next town.
The one thing we both took to was the motel room we shared each night. We might have been surrounded by stained carpet and rusty sinks, but we didn’t see it when we were together.
As much as I wanted more, before the tour, Hess and I had only kissed.
We couldn’t risk tiptoeing between our rooms after lights-out at Mom’s.
It was sweet torture to lie in bed touching myself, knowing that she was only a few feet away on the other side of the wall.
Sometimes I’d put my hand up to it, and I swear I could feel it pulsing.
The first night on tour, we were given only one bed at the motel. It sat there, charged, in the middle of the room, and we both stared at it, paralyzed.
All of my yearnings had stored up like muscle memory in my body, so it was the force of those lonely fantasies that finally took her hand and led her over to the bed.
Set free by my touch, Hess reached around and unzipped the back of my dress.
She pulled the straps down and let it fall to my ankles.
Then she gently brought my slip over my head and tossed it on the ground. I shivered.
Hess unhooked my bra, turning my breasts from cones to cakes.
She got on her knees and put her face in them, and when her nose grazed my nipple, it plucked my insides.
They were still humming when she gave it a furtive lick.
We were feeling it out as we went, and maybe we were a little timid and clumsy, but it was better for that.
Something so tender needs a light, fluttering touch, not force.
I ripped off my wig and flung it into the chair.
She unclipped my pantyhose and pulled down my undergarments.
I widened my legs, and she swept her fingers back and forth, gently again.
There was something more to her touch, like I could feel the Hess of her buzzing against me.
My knees went to jelly, and I nearly keeled over.
I clutched her shoulder to stay up, and I realized she still had all her clothes on. I pulled her up to standing and frantically stripped her, and the urgency created even more heat.
When she was naked, we lay down on the bed and pressed our bodies together. Finally, there was nothing between us. I could get as close as I wanted. I slid my fingers inside of her, desperate to give her something.
She had already given me so much.
But then she was touching me as well, and I stopped thinking my petty thoughts.
It was just us, back in the forest of our sound, rolling around on the moss.
As we touched each other, the buds of my tree sprouted into enormous triumphant blooms. They dripped nectar, coating their petals in fragrant honey.
When it became too much to bear, the flowers violently unfurled to their most exposed beauty. They stayed like this for a moment, raw and burning in the sunlight.
Then they curled at the edges and fell to the ground, spent but not dead. They would be absorbed back into the earth of me and come alive once again.
Afterward, we held each other on top of the bed and tried to catch our breaths. I felt soft-shelled and safe, like I never had as a child, and I wanted to tell her what I’d kept secret all these months. What lay at the hidden center of me, where my demon child heart beat.
“Hess?” I asked against her chest.
“Yes, my love?”
“My mother didn’t just die in a tragic accident. Or, that’s not the whole story.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her mother also died in a tragic accident at the same age, 33. And her mother before that, and her mother before that. The women in my family are cursed.”
Hess stopped playing with my hair and went silent.
I continued, “When she was 33, my great-great-grandmother traded her soul to the devil for a beautiful singing voice. She didn’t know she was cursing every woman in her bloodline thereafter with the gift to sing and the fate to die at 33, condemned to hell.
” Her cursed soul was handed down through the generations like a tattered wedding dress.
I paused. “Which means when I turn 33, I’m going to die. ”
I had never dared tell anyone this outside the holler.
I knew most would think I was out of my mind, or worse, stupid.
They wouldn’t understand that I grew up in a different place.
After centuries living on this planet, people have thrown their own veil over the world.
But in the holler, the veil is thin. We can see through it to nature and its truths.
I watched Hess carefully. She was calm and impassive, contemplating what I’d revealed.
“How does it feel? Knowing when you’ll die?” she asked.
I thought on it. “Sometimes I can feel the seconds ticking by, and it makes me feel like I can’t breathe. Every morning when I wake up, my first thought is: Fifteen. Fifteen more years.”
Hess nodded, urging me to go on.
“But it also makes me a little wilder, like I can take chances, ’cause I only got a bit of time left to do everything I want. It’s now or never.”
She took my hand and kissed it lightly. “It must be hard to live with, especially all by yourself.”
I nodded and clenched my teeth, willing myself not to cry.
She believed me.
It was the best gift I’d ever received. She pushed me onto my back and lowered herself. She smiled. “We should make the most of our time, then.” She kissed me, and I forgot about time. There was only her.
Hours later, I woke to cool air brushing against my bare skin, and I imagined someone barging in and seeing us like that.
I tried to remember the noises we had made and how loud, and I wondered if the rooms on either side had heard.
I’d been so possessed by the need to be alone with Hess that I hadn’t paid attention to our neighboring room assignments. I sat up suddenly, seized by panic.
She sat up, too, and asked me what was wrong, and I told her. Then she smiled and lay back down on the bed, stretching her arms languidly above her head.
“Oh, darling, I’m sure no one heard. They’re all passed out or having their own fun. No one cares about the sweet little Walker Sisters.” She giggled and tried to pull me back down to her. I saw that this was one real difference between us. Hess had never lived in fear like I had.
I wasn’t afraid of death; I knew when it would come for me.
But the world could make you wish you were dead if you weren’t careful.
At each stop on the tour, we played the morning slot in the tent meant for women and children seeking shelter from the heat. I could see our audiences perking up at our music, so I knew we had some effect.
But without an original song, we’d just be the nameless girl singers with the nice voices who played the classics with a swing. It was no longer enough that we got to play, on a stage, for people. I wanted to play our own music.
One night I tossed and turned as a melody looped in my dreams, tormenting me with each note.
When I woke, it was still there, teasing my mind.
I hummed it up at the ceiling, rousing Hess from sleep.
She hummed it back to me, and then as we rolled on our stockings and applied lipstick in the mirror, we hummed it together.
In the diner across the street, we talked about possible lyrics.
We wanted this one to be funny. Flirtatious.
There was such a lightness between us. We spoke mainly in private jokes that no one else could understand.
We were in the blush of new love, and we didn’t even have to hide it that much because we were young and sweet and apparently related.
One of our favorite jokes was mocking the way every venue host introduced us onstage, no matter the state:
“Now let’s welcome to the stage a pair of pretty little ladies…”
“Get ready for some sweet music from these pretty little ladies…”
“My oh my, here are some pretty little ladies for you…”
We should have called ourselves the Pretty Little Ladies for all people cared who we were.
It was doubly funny that I was such a rough-hewn hillbilly, hardly what many would call a “lady,” and Hess was not what you would have called “little.” She was proper, but she was taller and stronger than most of the men in our touring group.
And of course, our nighttime activities were hardly the actions of virginal, sugar-coated pretty little ladies.
I brought up the joke, and Hess said there was something there.
We sat in the diner for an hour while our eggs went cold, making a list of all the traits of a pretty little lady, and then, all the realities of being a woman.
We wanted to compare these in an upbeat, humorous story, where it felt like we were all laughing at ourselves by the end.
That’s how you pulled off something like that.
If we were all laughing, no one was getting their drawers in a bunch.
When we met, you called me pretty little lady
You loved how I fit in your palm
At the church, they called me pretty little lady
In my sweet little white gown
In the kitch’n, you called me pretty little lady
As I sweated over open flame
In the delivery, you called me pretty little lady
As the big, bouncing baby came
That morning we were headed to the next town in the bus for the lesser artists—mostly a bunch of kids and old drunks still working the circuit.
Usually I liked to look out the window and allow new music to enter me through the changing landscape.
There was something about passing new scenery that rearranged my mind and created ideas.
But for this ride, we worked for the full two hours, coming up with the right words and matching them to the tune we’d hummed all day.
When we got to the motel that night, we picked up our guitars and started to play the song for real. Once we’d worked out all the kinks, we played it through without stopping.
Hess and I locked eyes over our strings still vibrating in the stale motel air.
We could feel it.
That feeling when an idea finally achieves sparkling, solid reality. When it officially joins the world.
When we first boarded the tour, we’d had to get our set list cleared by Clayton and his music director.
It was just a bunch of classic country songs, so there’d been no issues.
That was what they wanted from us—sweet, lady-pitched background music for people to eat corn dogs to in the shade.
No one from the tour actually watched us past the first performance, so I figured it didn’t really matter what we played.
We could have tossed our guitars and whistled for all they cared.
So we were ready the next day when the announcer in Macon, Georgia, gave us the standard intro we’d hoped for:
“Now let’s give a big Georgia welcome to these pretty little ladies…”
We came in with the first verse echoing his words, We’re just pretty little ladies, and that made the audience laugh right off the bat.
We gave him knowing glances, making it seem like he was in on it.
We couldn’t have him telling Clayton we made fun of him.
Nothing’s more fragile than the ego of a man with just a little bit of power.
As the song went on, the audience really got into it, and when they started clapping to the beat, I knew we had them.
We’re just pretty little ladies
Like a flower bloomin’ all year long
We’re just pretty little ladies
It’s a miracle we can sing this song
Hess and I laughed like madwomen right there onstage, we were so high and relieved they liked it.
The next day, there were a few more people in the tent, and we played it again, and at the next show, there were a few more.
By the weekend, we had a real crowd. The announcer, who now felt a part of our act, delivered his line like a clown in a show.
It was a little slapstick for my taste, but the audience loved it.
When we stepped off the stage at the end of the set, Clayton was waiting for us with his arms crossed.
“No one told me you were doing new material.”
Hess jumped in to explain, but he put a hand up.
“It’s a great song. Where’d you get it from?”
“It’s ours, sir.”
He studied us for a moment and clicked his tongue against his teeth. “I want you all to play before me now, in the evenings. Just that song.”
I thought I might swallow my own heart.