Chapter 16
NINE YEARS LEFT
After the divorce, I took my sack of money and bought a little white house with a red door. It gleamed with being mine.
It looked like a tidy hobo lived inside. There was one brocade couch with a cigarette burn that Martha and I found trolling the rich neighborhoods in her truck. A few plates and glasses and forks and a frying pan. A mattress on the floor in the bedroom.
I had to make my money stretch now. The label had dropped me during the legal battle with Clayton.
So had all the managers and lawyers and men in suits who surrounded Clayton like a wool cocoon.
There were no offers coming in. My new phone was silent.
Life had been a constant stream of activity for years, and it had fed me.
Now, life stood still.
For the first time, I slept. I slept most of the day.
And in the evening, Phoebe or Martha would wake me and make me eat a bit.
Draw me a bath. Tima was out on tour, making her way through the summer festival circuit.
She called me late at night when she knew I’d be up and told me road stories to make me laugh.
The girls knew not to talk about Hess. All I’d heard was she’d moved back in with her parents, but that was it. At some point the girls had realized she and I were more than friends, but we never discussed it—one day they just knew, and it wasn’t a problem.
I wanted to ask if they’d seen her, and how she was doing. I wanted to know what she’d had for breakfast that morning. If she was wearing her hair the same way. If a touch behind the ear still made her shiver.
But I couldn’t keep opening the wound. So we pretended like she’d never existed.
I tried to work on music. I had this whole wooden trunk of songs. But when I played them, the words went bitter in my mouth. They all reminded me of her.
There were no new songs in my head, either.
It was like Hess had taken my music with her, just as she’d restored it when we first met.
I was back to that sad, sorry girl locked in the shed, no longer able to receive the music floating down from the heavens.
It was worse than death. The tree on my chest withered to a husk.
One night Phoebe brought over a box of paints and brushes to stimulate my creativity. We laid down old sheets on the floor and put on Tammy Wynette. But that just made me cry. So Phoebe switched it out for Donny Osmond, but that just made me annoyed.
Undeterred, she pulled out a record she’d borrowed from Martha. The band was called Black Sabbath, and a witch in a long black dress stood watching me from the cover.
Something seized up in me like I’d been caught. Like the devil had finally found me and now fixed me with his one yellow eye. I told her I couldn’t listen to the devil’s music, and she laughed and put it on anyway.
Rain poured down around us, and a church bell tolled in the distance. The guitar lurched through the scene like a funeral procession, slow and ominous. A man wailed as an evil figure approached, bringing his own destruction.
The song wasn’t afraid to acknowledge we were all doomed. In fact, it reveled in it.
I felt my own damned fate looming in the corner of the room, and for the first time in my life, I wondered what it would be like to give myself over to it. To stop pretending, or trying to hide from it. To open up my arms and let the devil in.
Phoebe offered me a canvas, but I waved it away. Instead, I dipped my hands in a pot of syrupy red paint. The guitar riffs picked up speed, and I smeared it on the living room wall in thick slashes. Phoebe squealed and dipped her own hands, and we stroked along with the music.
We were women possessed. It felt good.
When I woke the next evening with red under my nails, I was still empty of new music. My night of devil worship hadn’t worked.
Martha came by with a bag of Krystal burgers. After I’d eaten, she led me into the bathroom and told me to get cleaned up. We were going out.
We drove to the outskirts of town. In the middle of a dark, quiet neighborhood, one house was lit up and crawling with people. The men had long hair and beards that hung scraggled over their leather vests, and the women wore no makeup and walked barefoot in the grass.
As Martha and I made our way through the throng into the house, I touched my wig self-consciously.
I hadn’t worn it since I went into hibernation.
Sometimes it felt like armor, and other times, a weapon.
It always gave me confidence. But now I could feel its weight on my neck, the scratch of it against my scalp, the slick cheapness of its strands.
We snaked our way through the house and then out the back to the yard. There was a small fire surrounded by old lawn chairs and a few long-haired boys strumming lazily on guitars.
We sat in empty chairs, and one of the men looked me over.
“Hey, ain’t you that girl who sings with Clayton Redd?”
“Not anymore. My name is Belle. Belle Powers.” I extended my hand for him to shake, but he just went back to strumming.
Another boy added, “My mama’s got all his albums. She likes to play them at Christmas. Makes me wanna blow my brains out.” He made his hand into a pistol and shot himself in the head. They all guffawed.
I still had a lot of anger for Clayton. But some of his music had been my music. Or at least, I’d been singing it. And the way these boys were dismissing him, as if they knew what it took to get where he’d gotten. It just pissed me off.
“So what are your names?” I asked.
They mumbled their names around the circle, and I crossed my arms.
“Huh. Never heard of you.”
I stalked off from the fire to the other side of the yard where a pair of old metal swings sat rusting.
I sat down and started pumping my legs. It was like being back in school.
Me, all alone on the swings, smarting from someone calling me a demon child.
I went higher and higher, getting closer to the stars with each climb.
A man walked over and started swinging next to me. It was dark in this corner of the yard, and I could only see the gleam of his blue eyes and the pearl of his smile as we soared higher together. At the highest point, we both paused and let ourselves fall back to the earth.
I slowed, and then stopped, and he did the same. We were both a little out of breath, and a giggle escaped from my lips. It was the first time I’d laughed since Hess left, and the release felt foreign in my chest. I looked down, dragging my shoes through the dust.
“I hope I’m not intruding.”
His voice was crisp and clear, with an unfamiliar accent that was like cold milk and peanuts in my ears. Different from the people I’d grown up with and met in Nashville. Even Hess, for all of her schooling and proper speaking, still had a bit of sweetgrass in her voice.
“Not at all.” I tried to see what he looked like, but he was still just a glint of eye and teeth in the night.
He reached over and offered his hand. “Tate Larsen.”
I took it, and my hand slid against the thin calluses on his palm. Not like the thick pads of men who’ve worked for years; these were new—rough over smooth.
“Belle. Belle Powers.”
“I know who you are.”
“Yeah, what, ‘Clayton Redd’s girl singer’?”
He smirked. “I saw you sing at Darlene’s when I first got to Nashville in ’67. And when I saw you were playing the Opry the next year, I spent my rent money on a ticket.”
I laughed. “I bet you regretted that.”
He smiled. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat. You have a magical voice, Ms. Powers.”
The way his words reverberated through me made me a little angry. I didn’t need another man telling me I had a great voice. I knew I did. I didn’t need his approval. None of it.
“I should probably get going. It’s late.” I stood up out of my swing.
“If that’s what you need to do.”
“I just… I don’t need you blowing rainbows up my skirt, okay?”
He smirked. “I promise not to compliment your voice again. Scout’s honor.”
I sat back down. “Well, I don’t know about that…” I returned the smirk. It was nice to talk to someone who knew nothing about my real life. “Where you from? I know it ain’t here.”
He relaxed back into his swing. “Minnesota. What about you?”
“The mountains.”
“An authentic country girl. Rare these days.”
“And I still got all my teeth, can you believe it?” I bared my fake teeth in an unsettling grin, and he laughed.
I heard Martha calling my name, and I saw that most of the party had congregated around the fire in a big jagged circle. Tate and I stood up and joined everyone, separating to sit with our respective friends.
A man in his thirties with a guitar slung across his middle introduced himself as Don and welcomed everyone to his home. Half the circle were clutching guitars or basses, and there were handheld percussion instruments scattered throughout. I even saw someone with spoons.
Don played the first chords of an old Bob Wills tune, and a couple guitars joined in. Another man with a russet beard started to sing, and his sound was coarse against the sweet melody, like stubble rubbing against my face.
I saw Tate across the circle, lit up now by the flames. He was beautiful in the way teen boys were beautiful, with a tenderness beneath a serious, rough exterior. His hair was thick and shaggy to his chin, and his beard was more neat than some of the others.
I leaned over and whispered to Martha, “Do you know that guy? The one with the old Gibson?”
She searched for him in a sea of men clutching Gibsons. “Oh, Tate. Yeah. Fine voice. Good player. Amazing songwriter.” I loved that this is what Martha thought of first—his qualities as a musician. “He’s written a few songs for big artists.”
“Is he married or…”
“No, he’s single.” She looked concerned. “I don’t know, Lou. He’s kind of a heartbreaker.”
I thought, Yes.
Across the circle, I heard a familiar tune start up. Tate was strumming the first bars of the old murder ballad I played that time at the Opry.
He was staring right at me, daring me to sing. I accepted the challenge.
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 could feel the rough edge of something new in my voice catching as the song slid out of my throat. The pain of the last few months had added depth to my sound.
But the words themselves, they had come before I ever met Hess, and it felt good to sing something without a trace of her.
There was an honesty in singing about my curse this way, in front of all these people. A morbid acceptance. I remembered how lifted I felt when I performed it at the Opry.
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
Later, when we walked en masse back to our cars in the early-morning light, there came a clear, crisp voice behind my ear, “Come back to my place.”
“No.”
“Then come tomorrow.”
“It is tomorrow.”
“Come later, then. Whenever you want. It’s the one with the pirate flag on Blossom Road. I’ll be there.”
When I looked behind me, he was gone.