Chapter 15
In early August that summer, Micah and I went to Martha’s for the first time. She lived across the river on the east side of Nashville, where long-haired tattooed locals walked amongst historic homes and the neon pulsed at a lower volume.
Inside Martha’s modest bungalow, musicians of different ages sprawled across couches and hunched on the floor, smoking and drinking from jelly jars.
Candles burned on every surface, illuminating shelves of records lining the walls as Judee Sill’s “Down Where the Valleys Are Low” spun on the turntable.
Micah raised his eyebrows at me, clearly impressed, and I raised mine in response. I felt like we’d just entered the real Nashville, and everything up until this point had only been a performance.
Martha appeared and handed us each a jar of golden liquid. “Sparkling pear juice, if you dig. I keep a dry house.” We each took a drink, and it tasted like something a fairy might sip. Martha elbowed me gently in the ribs. “I met your father at a party like this.”
This was why I had called her. Since the Fourth, I’d ruminated on what Clayton had said about my father. I’d been so focused on Belle that I’d almost forgotten about him.
When I’d asked Hess, she’d bristled with disdain. She told me she never knew my dad, and when I asked why, she said something vague about a falling out with Belle. It’d taken a while, but lately I’d noticed that she often answered my questions about Belle with half answers.
I had the keen sense she was hiding things from me.
At the same time, I could feel her watching me. Tracking my movements. Sometimes she made passive-aggressive comments when I came home late.
When I’d introduced her to Micah, she’d been polite to the point of coldness, and the conversation had devolved into her grilling him on why he wasn’t going to college.
The past year had been tough for him with his brother’s death, and his grades had slipped.
He also didn’t feel ready for college—he had no idea what he wanted to study, and shouldn’t it be more deliberate than that?
Especially when it was so expensive? I thought Hess would be impressed by his thoughtfulness, or at least sensitive to the fact that he clearly didn’t come from money.
But this only deepened her suspicion of him.
She and I had been so close at the beginning of the summer. But now that connection had stretched and strained, and I often couldn’t wait to be out of the house, no longer under her watchful gaze.
As the weeks passed, I spent most of my time with Micah in a haze of early love. Even when we were just talking or eating or walking through the streets, being together felt historic, cosmic, cataclysmic.
Sometimes, though, when I hadn’t seen him in a day or two and he hadn’t called, I would imagine him dropping me, and the fear could be so intense I thought I was losing my mind. I still couldn’t believe someone as special as him could love me—maybe want me, but not love me.
Martha continued, “Your father used to try out new songs at these house parties. Wasn’t much of a singer, but nobody cared because his words were so beautiful.”
I imagined the shaggy-haired Jesus-looking man I’d come to know from the scant pictures I’d found, sitting on the rug with a beat-up guitar and rasping out his latest poetry from a scribbled page.
“How did he meet my mom?”
“They also met at a party—I actually introduced them.” She had an edge to her voice, like maybe she was a little bit ashamed of this fact.
I wanted her to tell me more, but then someone yelled her name from the kitchen, and she put up a finger. “Hold tight. I’ll be back in a shake.”
Micah and I drifted over to her records and thumbed carefully through them. There was everything you could imagine—Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, TLC.
Martha returned, and Micah said, “This is a sick collection—and so much that’s not country.”
“I love music,” she answered simply. “Country is my first love, but there’s too much out there to ignore. And they all borrow from each other. Your mama was the same way.”
“Really?” I asked.
Martha nodded. “Oh, yeah. You’ll never guess who she was into around the time she met your father.”
“Who?”
“Black Sabbath.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yep.”
Micah pulled an album from the shelf and showed it to us. “What’s this?”
On the cover, a woman in a long black dress stood at a distance at the edge of a forest. She was far enough away that you couldn’t make out her face, but you could feel her intense gaze searing into yours.
Along the bottom in red cursive was written “The Cursed Woman” and then next to it, “Belle Powers.”
I took it from him and studied it closely, as if it were an occult object. I’d listened to every album my mother had ever put out—all of them lined up on a special shelf in Hess’s music room—and I’d never come across this one.
Martha’s brow furrowed. “You’ve never seen this before?”
“No, definitely not.”
“It’s not in Hess’s collection?”
“No.”
Her mouth flattened. “Well, that is your mother’s first solo album. And my favorite of hers, actually. I played on almost every track.” She took the album from Micah and slid out the disc, then handed the sleeve back to me. “We’re listening to this next.”
Micah and I found a spot on the floor amid the sprawled musicians, and I studied the woman on the cover, searching for some stroke of Belle in her face.
As I stared, the dots of color blurred and grayed, and I could feel myself being pulled into the image through the gaze of the woman, my body dissolving, my eyes the only thing left of me.
I felt a hand on mine, and I suddenly returned to the room, my scalp gone cold. Micah whispered that it was starting, and I turned the sleeve over for the track list, hiding the woman from view.
The first track, “Folk Song,” began with simple, ominous guitar, and then she sang:
There was a woman in town who sang so sweet
Her beauty was beyond compare
But one day a bright specter she did meet
There aft she was no longer fair
I felt a cold finger drag down my spine, freezing my body in place.
She ranted and raved and ran over town
Chased by somethin’ not seen
She ran so far that she came to a cliff
And it chased her over to free’n
The voice was my mother’s at her most stripped down and magnetic, beckoning us around a fire so she could tell us a story.
When the last note died on the player, I felt my body relax, no longer frozen. I waited for the second track, my spine still tingling.
A fierce fiddle kicked up, and I checked the track list. “Duet with the Devil.”
It told the story of a woman long ago who traded her soul for a beautiful singing voice, thereby cursing every woman in her bloodline to an early death.
And then the next track played, “Black Gum Tree,” describing a pregnant woman hit by a car and thrown in a tree, saving her baby’s life with her soft, powerful body. Not just an accident, but fate. One that couldn’t be escaped.
The fourth, “Mountain Girl,” began slower, with a sense of atmosphere between the fiddle and guitar plucks, like fog was rolling in.
She sang about a little mountain girl, cursed from birth, who everyone called a demon child.
But she didn’t care because she had something they didn’t have—when she walked among the trees, she heard music floating down from God above.
It was the thing that transcended all of the pain, the thing that made her want to live.
Next played “Let Me Out,” the song I’d heard that first night at Hess’s, and I seized up immediately, feeling the same panic start to take over. I tried to shift focus to the conversation next to me, where a girl whispered to her friend, “Have you ever heard the rumors about her?”
“What do you mean?”
“Apparently she—”
Someone shooshed her, and the girl went silent. I turned to ask what she was going to say, but then the track ended, and I was distracted by the ascending movement of the music.
“The Cursed Woman.”
Not what you would expect from a song with that name.
Belle sang in a round, hopeful voice about the girl finding release in finally accepting her fate. Then the song built to an almost ecstatic climax of joy, like she was having a religious awakening. She was rapturous, bathed in her own light, haunted but not chained.
She was the cursed woman. And she would live as such, chasing freedom and repelling fear.
The next track was called “Old Crone,” where the cursed woman imagined the old age she would never experience—to some, it might have sounded like a blessing, but to her it was a loss.
She saw herself growing old in New Orleans, her hair going coarse and gray like the Spanish moss hanging from the trees.
No longer yoked to the demands of youth, free to walk unobserved through the world and delight herself however she saw fit.
Then I waited for the instrumental opening for the last track, “Lullaby for a Demon Child,” but I heard only a delicate voice wafting through the air. It was close and quiet, as if she was speaking right in my ear:
Baby, don’t be ’fraid
When I leave too soon
Baby, don’t be ’fraid
I’ll be your moon
Another voice repeated the verse, this one so rich and deep it made my belly ache, and then another voice sang the words, this one strong and clear like rushing water.
Then the trio was singing all together, and the harmony of their voices swaddled me and held me against its chest.
Baby, don’t be ’fraid
When the white dog moan
Baby, don’t be ’fraid
You’ll nev’r be alone
I dug my nails into my fists to keep the tears from flowing. I knew without knowing, I was the child she was singing to.
Baby, don’t be ’fraid
When you wake at night
Baby, don’t be ’fraid
I’ll be your light
Baby, don’t be ’fraid
When it comes for you
Baby, don’t be ’fraid
’Cause I’m there with you
The album ended, but the disc continued to spin on the turntable, emitting a fuzzy sound, and I strained to hear what it might be saying.