Chapter 9
Seven weeks went by, and what she remembered afterward was that nothing happened in them.
That is not the same as nothing changing.
She got up. She fed the dog. She fixed the fence in the west pasture herself and did a poor job of it and then went back three days later and did it again properly, which she recognized, while she was doing it, as a thing she had watched a man do on a roof in April, and which she chose not to think about any further.
Her lawyer sent papers and she read all of them.
She sold the dead truck to a man in Hondo for parts, and cried about it for one minute in the barn, and then took the four hundred dollars and put it in an account with only her name on it, which was the first such account she had had since she was twenty-two.
The tapes finished running and, exactly as he had said, the whole thing died in about ten days. The internet found a football coach to be angry at.
And every night, between nine and midnight, she wrote.
That was the change. Not a decision — she never sat down and decided anything. It was simply that the hoping had gone out of her, all of it, in one piece, on a Thursday in July with a screwdriver in her hand, and the hole it left was enormous and had to have something put in it.
So she put songs in it.
I'm done, she thought, most nights, around midnight, with her hand cramping. That's it. That's the whole thing about me now. I'm a woman who's done.
There is a great deal of room inside a woman who has stopped waiting.
Trina came out on a Tuesday in the middle of August and stood in the kitchen doorway with her hands on her hips.
"Cypress Hall does a round on Sundays."
"I know what Cypress Hall does."
"Six o'clock. Four songwriters, no cover, they pass a jar." Trina picked a peach up out of the bowl and put it back. "I signed you up."
Georgia stopped drying the pan.
"You did what."
"I called Delmar and I said put Georgia down."
"Trina Guerra."
"Now, before you get going." Trina held a hand up. "I have had one idea in my entire life and this is it, so hear it all the way out. That is a dance hall with a jar. It ain't a stage. There's gonna be about forty people in there and a dozen of 'em are gonna be there for the chicken-fried steak."
"I can't do that."
"Why not."
"Because — " Georgia put the pan down. "Because there are forty people in this county who will show up on a Sunday to watch Jesse Rawls's wife have a nervous breakdown with a guitar, and I will not be a spectacle, Trina, I've had a full year of being a spectacle —"
"Then take your name back off it."
"I will."
"Okay."
"I'm going to call him tomorrow and take it off."
"Okay," Trina said, and got herself a glass of tea and sat down, and did not say another word about it, which was the single most manipulative thing anyone had done to Georgia all summer, and it worked.
She did not call Delmar.
She spent five days not calling Delmar. On Wednesday she got as far as picking up the phone.
On Friday she wrote out what she'd say. On Saturday afternoon she took the guitar out of the case for the first time in — she genuinely did not know.
Years. She had kept the calluses out of pure stubbornness, playing in the back room with the door shut, ten minutes at a time, the way other people pray without believing in anything.
She played through one of the new ones, sitting on the edge of the bed.
It was not good.
She played it again, slower, and found the place where it had gone wrong, and it was a line she'd been proud of, and she took the line out.
Then it was good.
She sat there on the edge of the bed at three in the afternoon and understood, with something close to fury, that she still knew how to do this. Sixteen years, and it had just been sitting in there the whole time like a well under a field.
Cypress Hall had been standing on that road since 1928 and smelled like it: floor wax, cold beer, and about ninety years of cigarettes that predated the ban.
She had played it at twenty. Twice a month for a year and a half, before the record, before him, back when the crowd was nine men and a woman selling raffle tickets for a volunteer fire department.
It had not changed one particle. Same tin ceiling. Same string of bulbs. Same sign behind the bar that said NO DANCING ON THE TABLES that nobody had ever obeyed.
She got there at five thirty and stood in the doorway and could not go in.
"Move," said Trina, behind her, with two plates.
"Give me a minute."
"You've had five days of minutes."
"Trina."
"You're white as a sheet."
"I know it."
"You want me to go get the truck?" Trina said, and she meant it — that was the thing, she absolutely meant it, she would have driven her home right then and never mentioned it again. "Say the word and we're gone and we'll go eat at the Dairy Queen."
Georgia stood there holding her own guitar case.
"No," she said.
There were about sixty people, which was worse than forty.
She sat at a table near the front with her hands flat on her knees under it and did not eat. Delmar, who ran the round, was sixty-something and had known her father and treated the whole thing like a rotary meeting.
Three players went before her. A kid of about nineteen with two very earnest songs about a girl. A man in his fifties who played the same song he had been playing for thirty years. A woman from Utopia with a fiddle who was better than either of them and knew it.
Georgia heard almost none of it.
Her body had gone somewhere strange. Her hands were cold in an August dance hall, actually cold, and she could not feel the ends of her fingers, and she sat there thinking, in a distant clinical way: I cannot feel my hands. I can't play if I can't feel my hands.
She had stood in the wings of buildings with eighteen thousand people in them. She had shaken hands with two governors. She had gone to the Opry in a dress that cost more than her first car.
She was more frightened in that room than she had ever been in her life.
Because none of that had been hers. Every one of those rooms, she had been standing in it as somebody's. There is no fear in that; there is nothing to lose in a room where you are furniture.
"Georgia Rawls," Delmar said into the microphone, and then, because he had known her father, "Well — Georgia Tidwell, some of y'all'll know."
Somebody at the back went, "Hey."
And she got up, and her legs held, and she went and sat on the stool.
The first thirty seconds were terrible.
Her hands were wrong. She could hear it. She rushed the first line and had to catch it, and the catch was audible, and there was a little silence in the room of sixty people who all knew exactly whose wife she was and had all decided, generously and in unison, to be kind about this.
She could feel the kindness coming at her like heat off a road.
No, she thought.
And then something got up out of the bottom of her — something with about four months in it, and sixteen years under that — and she stopped playing.
Dead stop, mid-line. The room went absolutely quiet.
"I'm gonna start that again," she said.
Somebody laughed, once, sympathetically.
"No, I mean it." She looked out at them and heard her own voice come out level and dry and entirely hers. "Y'all have been real nice for about a minute and a half and it's about to ruin my life. So I'm gonna need everybody to quit being nice at me and just go on and listen."
There was a beat.
Then the woman from Utopia said, "Amen," and the whole room laughed, and something came loose in the middle of it.
Georgia put her hands back on the guitar and could feel them.
She played the one she'd written four years ago.
She had written it in November, alone, at the kitchen table, in the second year of the ten-month routings, and it was about a woman in a house listening to a truck that turns out to be somebody else's truck.
It was three verses and it had no chorus, because it had never been for anybody, and she had never played it out loud above a whisper.
She played it out loud.
Sixty people in a dance hall did not move.
There is a specific quality to the silence of a room that is listening rather than being polite.
It has weight. It presses back a little.
She had not felt that since she was twenty-two years old and she had honestly believed it was a thing she had made up afterward, the way you make up how good a summer was.
She finished. Nobody clapped for about a second and a half.
Then they did.
And then a man near the bar called out, in the friendliest voice in the world, "Play Half a Tank!"
The room made a noise. Not a bad noise. Half of it was laughing, and a good number of them clapped, because it was the obvious thing and it was a Sunday and everybody there knew that bridge was hers — it had been on the radio all summer that the bridge was hers, in among everything else that had been on the radio all summer.
He meant it as a gift. She could see him meaning it. He was about sixty and he had a Pearl in his hand and he was giving her the biggest thing he had to give, which was permission to take back a piece of something.
Georgia let it go quiet.
"No, sir," she said.
The room shifted.
"Aw, now —"
"I appreciate it." Level. Pleasant. Absolutely immovable. "I've got one more of mine and then I'm gonna go eat."
"It's your song, darlin'."
"Part of it is."
"Well then."
"Then it's mine to not play," Georgia said.
Nobody had anything to say to that.
It cost her. She felt it cost her, in real time, standing up there — sixty people who had been all the way with her four minutes ago cooled by about ten degrees, and two men at the back put their heads together, and somebody's wife said something with her hand up.
She had just declined to be the story they came for. There is no version of that a room forgives immediately.
And she found, sitting on that stool with her hands on her own guitar, that she did not care even slightly.