Chapter 5
FIFTEEN YEARS LEFT
Those who pay attention know the perfect days are unplanned.
It was the first warm day of spring. Hess and I drove along a dirt road in the sunshine with my bare feet hanging out the window, tree branches tickling the bottoms as they moved to the beat of Dolly Parton’s “Dumb Blonde” on the radio.
I wanted to climb on the roof, put my arms out, and fly through the early afternoon.
I’d been at Mom’s for a few months then, and for the first time in my sorry existence, life had slipped into a blissful rhythm.
Hess stopped the car at the edge of a small lake, and the radio went quiet. I’d gotten so used to being surrounded by people that I could hear the silence.
We were completely alone.
Hess pulled her dress off, revealing a red bikini, and ran through the grass toward the water. I undressed as I ran after her, and we both jumped in at the same time. The water was warm as a bathtub with cool spots that I liked to float over, imagining they were tunnels to some other place.
We’d come to hear the sound of our voices in water.
We swam to the center of the lake, where the water was so low from drought that Hess could still stand, but my tiny legs couldn’t touch the bottom.
I sang out a few bars of nonsense, and the dewy sound echoed between us, damp with its green.
Hess matched the tone, and we cooed to one another like mermaids.
I noticed drops of water were pearled in Hess’s eyelashes and at the corners of her lips. I tried not to stare at her too much because I didn’t want to give her the creeps. But sometimes I couldn’t help myself.
She stared back at me, unguarded. “You must be getting tired,” she said.
I’d nearly forgotten my body, but now I could feel the burn in my limbs, and the beginning of that frantic need to find solid ground. “Yeah, a little.”
“Why don’t you hold on to me?”
I swam to her, and she reached out and brought my legs around her waist like a child, though I didn’t feel like one.
I kept my torso a few inches away to keep some distance between us, but she gently pulled my back toward her.
I instinctively put my arms around her neck.
Our faces were very close now, and I could smell the stone and petals of her natural scent, even in the lake water.
I shivered against her warm body, and she held me tighter.
“Hey, Lou.”
“Hey,” I said, a bit unsteadily.
“I don’t mean to pry…”
Even pressed together, she was still so damn polite. “Yes?”
“What is that on your chest?”
I looked down and saw the mud-colored branches fanning out from the top of my bathing suit, and my insides twitched. I’d forgotten about it entirely. Though I knew she’d seen it when I was sick, I’d been careful since moving into Mom’s to keep myself covered.
I looked up at Hess’s concerned face, and I wondered if I could really trust her.
I knew I had to let myself be known, even in small ways.
Otherwise, I’d truly disappear. I knew this, and yet, it was still hard for me to do it most of the time.
Everyone I’d ever trusted had turned out to be a rat bastard.
But Hess was different.
I told her it was a birthmark. The trunk started at my belly button and followed up my chest, where its branches fanned out like a tree, with the tips grazing my collarbone.
A mark like this was the sign of a trauma that happened to the mother during pregnancy.
An experience so harrowing that it left a mark on the baby in her belly like a scar.
I told her when my mama was nine months pregnant, she was hit by a truck while crossing the road and landed in a black gum tree. She didn’t survive, but somehow, cushioned by her body and the branches of that tree, I lived through it.
My daddy had left town months before, and he was never found, but his family took me in.
Apparently my mother’s people had wanted me, too, but they weren’t exactly respected in the town.
I didn’t tell Hess that every woman in my mama’s family, as far back as anyone could remember, had died at the age of 33 of some tragic accident. I knew she’d think I was crazy.
Instead, I told her I went to live in a small wooden house with my grandparents, aunt, uncle, and their three boys. My aunt had always wanted a girl, which was why they fought so hard for me. But soon after I came, she got pregnant again, this time with a girl, and I became dead weight.
I wasn’t the kind of girl she wanted anyway—the kind who liked to stay at home and help with the cooking and gossip.
I did what they asked, but I much preferred exploring the woods and writing songs by myself.
When they found out I could sing, they started renting me out for things like people’s parties and church stuff, and they treated me a little better. But I was more mule than daughter.
I’d been plotting my escape for years when fate stepped in and forced my hand. Of course, I couldn’t tell her why I’d had to leave in the middle of the night in the dead of winter. That was a story I was taking to my grave.
Hess listened quietly the whole time I was speaking and never asked a question, or interrupted with her own story.
When I was done, she held me a little harder against her, and I put my cheek to her chest. I didn’t cry or anything, because this was just my life.
But it felt good to rest my head against a body that cared for me; I could feel it like a force radiating from her skin.
I wanted to be somehow closer to her, inside her in a way, and I worried I might do something that would scare her off.
I brought my head up and gently pushed away from her with a little splash to make a game of it.
Something hard to read crossed her face, but then she splashed me in turn, and the moment passed.
As we floated on our backs, that old country tune “The Prisoner’s Song” fluttered down and beat its wings in my head:
Oh, please meet me tonight in the moonlight
Please meet me tonight all alone
Hess came in on the next verse:
For I have a sad story to tell you
And then our voices came together in harmony, gliding across the water and wrapping us in its sound:
It’s a story that’s never been told
The tingle of the lake lingered in my skin as I flipped bologna sandwiches and restocked glasses that night at Darlene’s Indigo Lounge. The place was a tiny, narrow honky-tonk around the corner from the Ryman, and just being close to the Opry gave it a bit of magic.
Hess sat at the end of the bar in her regular spot, reading a novel. She had this ability to block out all noise around her, creating a bell of serenity in the middle of the roughness. I refilled her Coca-Cola and tried to catch her eye, but she didn’t look up.
“I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” moaned from the jukebox for the eighth time in a row, and I watched as one of the regulars stared sorrowfully into his whiskey glass.
It was a great song, but someone needed to put this guy out of his misery.
The real music would be starting any moment, and I gazed longingly at the little stage.
I’d asked Darlene a dozen times now if she’d let Hess and me play just one song up there, but she always said no without explanation.
I heard Darlene curse and slam the phone down in the back.
She came out and asked Ronnie, the bartender, about his friend’s band in a clipped voice.
They sometimes filled in when someone flaked.
The Opry had just let out, and people were starting to stream in, their voices rising above the wail of Hank Williams.
Ronnie told her the lead singer’s wife had just had a baby, and he didn’t think he would come. He started to name off alternatives, but I stepped between them and looked Darlene square in the eye.
“Let us play, Leenie. It’ll take anyone else half an hour to get here. Look at all these people. You’ve got no other choice.”
She eyed me. “I’d rather go up there and shake my fanny than let you do that. I told you—this place ain’t your big break.”
“Please. Just one song. If they hate us, you can shoo us off with the broom. I’ll babysit your kids for free on Sunday. I’ll goddamn do anything, just let us sing!”
She thought about it for a moment, taking in the growing herd pushing toward the bar. Live music acted as a gentle drug for this crowd, and she wouldn’t be able to hold them off for much longer.
“Fine. One song. You got thirty seconds to be up on that stage. Don’t get yourselves killed.”
Hess had been listening, and without a word exchanged, she ran out of the bar.
I unknotted my apron and plunged my fingertips into a glass of water sitting in the sink and tried to smooth my hair down.
Ronnie poured me a shot of apple pie shine, and I threw it back.
Hess returned with a guitar in each hand: her beautiful new Gibson and her old Kay I’d been using with its swirl of dark wood.
We fought our way through the roil of bodies with our guitars held above our heads like soldiers crossing a river with rifles. When we finally made it to the small platform, we elbowed a few out of the way, climbed up to the stage, and got into position.
Hess and I locked eyes, and I wondered if I looked as scared as I felt, as if I was about to face a firing squad. But Hess looked ready for battle, and it lit the warrior fire in me, too. With her by my side, I could do anything.
We strummed a few bars of the song’s intro, and no one paid attention. Then I came in solo for the first verse I’d written all those weeks ago:
She sat in the room, watchin’ the tree,
Waitin’ for someone to set her free
People started to look up as my voice rang out through the place.
My sound is high and rich at the same time, with a lilting roundness that comes from my accent.
I know I’m not supposed to think things like this, like maybe it doesn’t make me a real artist, but I love my voice.
It isn’t always perfect, and there’ve been times when I’ve strained to push the sound from my body. But I really think it’s beautiful.
Hess came in low and steady underneath me for the chorus:
Let me out, Lord
Let me be free
Let me out, Lord
Who will I be?
Meanwhile that tight, coiled rhythm twisted around the room, and as more heads turned our way, I could feel the unrest building.
The song was closing in, trapping them. One man called for us to cut it out, and then another joined in the heckle, and the tide built against us, even if I could tell some were intrigued by the sound.
In a pause in the lyrics, I whispered to Hess, and we gradually changed from her serpentine riff to “The Prisoner’s Song” we’d sung earlier at the lake. We harmonized, taking the old tune and speeding it up for a bigger, more modern sound:
Now if I had wings like an angel
Over these prison walls I would fly
And I’d fly to the arms of my poor darlin’
And there I’d be willing to die
The atmosphere in the room changed immediately as we set the audience free, and pairs of dancers took turns in the space between the tables. The same men that had heckled us moments earlier now hollered up at the rafters and ordered more beers.
We started taking requests, as Hess and I knew a lot of songs between us.
We’d been practicing together for weeks, and we had an unspoken language.
It felt like we were sharing one brain, one heart, one set of hands.
But there were two throats: the voice all my own floating up toward the ceiling and hers coming in to tether it to the ground.
After an hour or so, Darlene motioned for us to clear out for the next act, and we stumbled sweat-soaked and giggling into the women’s bathroom.
Hess went into a stall and pulled me in behind her, and we both leaned against opposite walls, still gasping from the elation. I had never felt so lifted before.
I stared freely at Hess’s hair stuck to her glistening collarbone, her strong arms, the golden harvest of her body.
I had that desperate, bone-aching feeling again of wanting to be closer to her, and I took a step forward.
It was a tiny stall, so she only had to move a few inches more to bring us front to front, the outer tips of our bodies grazing against one another and filling me with red, electric pleasure.
Hess moved even closer, pushing me back against the wall.
She nuzzled her nose against mine, and our mouths parted but didn’t touch, held there in that space and time right before. It tasted like strawberries and their bitter green stems.
Then her mouth slid into mine, and the boundary between us fell away as it did when we played music, and there was only slick, smooth pleasure curving from side to side. I knew our hands were on each other, but I couldn’t tell what we were touching, only that it felt good everywhere.
A rough knock rattled the door and startled us apart. A woman yelled at us to hurry up, and we scurried out with our eyes cast down.
I looked in the mirror at my mouth ringed in red and the wild tangle of my hair.
Hess looked unblemished; if anything, her face shone a little brighter.
She wet a corner of her dress with cold water and held it up to my skin, then raked her hands through my hair.
I closed my eyes as her fingertips stroked my scalp, evoking the pleasure from before.
Then another woman came in, and Hess pulled her hands back. We each turned to the mirror and pretended to primp.
Once I was presentable, we returned to the main room, and I put my apron back on. Hess took her usual place at the bar, and she buried herself in her book once again. On the surface it was like nothing had happened.
But everything had changed.
As I made my rounds collecting glasses, the cowboys were more beautiful, the whiskey more jewel-like, the band’s music sweeter to my ears. The bar blushed under its lights, and I made a game of waiting as long as I could to look in the far corner.
When I could no longer stand it, I allowed my eyes to wander where they wanted, and she was there, staring back at me.
My love.