Chapter 17
NINE YEARS LEFT
Tate lived on the far edge of town where the trees breathed. I found my way there the next afternoon, and we sat behind his house, watching them inhale and exhale.
We were waiting for the right moment to enter the woods.
I wasn’t sure when that would be; something inside me would align, and then it’d be time.
But right then, the world was still shifting.
We were in this in-between space, this fuzzy black-and-white space, where the world around us hadn’t decided what it wanted to be.
I had never done LSD before, so I couldn’t be sure if this was normal. But it didn’t feel dangerous.
Tate dragged a finger across the top of my hand lying flat in the grass.
I could feel the weight and quality of his mind in that touch, fizzing against my skin like powder mixed with vinegar.
I looked into his eyes, and he suddenly blazed into full, radiant peaches and blues against the black and white.
The scene around us burst into color as well, and the trees stood before us, beckoning with their swelling purple trunks. He and I stood up. We clasped hands. And we walked toward the wall of nature like a portal.
In the woods, I took off my shoes and flung my wig onto a branch. I became a child again.
We walked slowly between the trees, touching every surface, savoring every sensation. If I looked at anything for too long, it would start to expand and unfurl. Moss sprouted small blooms and tree bark swirled into intricate patterns. My gaze had the power to unlock new life.
We found a little pond with a few fish wiggling under the surface.
Tate told me about ice fishing in Minnesota where he’d grown up.
They’d make a little house on the ice, cut a hole in it, and lower their line.
His parents were conservative churchgoing people, but when they were out on the ice or crouching in a deer stand, his dad would let him have a bit of whiskey in his hot chocolate.
The normal rules didn’t apply in these special places.
He asked me about my childhood, and I told him that I’d once slept for a week in an abandoned deer stand.
It was summer, and in the absence of school, I needed an escape from my aunt’s family.
I stole a blanket from the house and used dried weeds to soften the wood boards.
I lived off wild blackberries and a sack of jerky I’d swiped from the cellar.
When I finally returned seven days later, my aunt asked where I’d been all day. She needed help with the wash.
Tate asked me quietly what happened to my parents. I started to tell him the canned version of my story, the one I’d dreamed up in that truck on the way to Nashville and had given for years in interviews.
My parents were taken home to Heaven in a car accident, and I was raised by my loving aunt and uncle, accepted as one of their own in a beautiful mountain holler, where we loved God and lived a humble, peaceful life.
To tell you the truth, I was sick of that story.
I had kept my secrets so long from others, afraid of what would happen if I exposed them, and yet, the thing I’d feared had already happened.
The person I loved most hadn’t believed me, had treated me like a dumb hillbilly, and I was still standing, wasn’t I?
I didn’t want to hide anymore. Maybe now, I could live some version of the truth.
I asked Tate to sit in the leaves with me, and I told him that my father had left, and my mother had died at 33 from a family curse. I unbuttoned my shirt and bared myself to him, showing him my tree in all its glory. The tree that killed my mother.
The air danced over my naked skin, and my breasts pebbled. I watched his face, searching for a glimmer of doubt in his eye. But he only stared thoughtfully, and after a long silence, he asked me what it was like to know I would die in nine years.
It was the same question Hess had asked me, and I wondered what that meant. Perhaps he really believed me. Perhaps not. It didn’t matter anymore, did it? This was my truth, whether he believed it or not.
I told him what I’d told Hess, that it weighed heavily on me, but it also inspired me to take risks. I didn’t live as if my days were infinite; I squeezed the blood out of life and painted my cheeks with it.
But that wasn’t the whole story, was it?
I’d been told all my life that I was a demon child, that I was going to hell.
And so when I was little, I had often imagined where I was headed: a place of pain without escape, a place where the only sound was a terrible noise.
It haunted me at all hours of the day—in my sleep, at my desk at school, in the pew at church.
That was the demon child’s greatest secret—she was very, very afraid.
And it wasn’t just the idea of hell—it was that she was supposed to spend the rest of eternity there.
And whenever she tried to imagine that cursed eternity, a terrible, suffocating feeling would overtake her, and she’d want to die—not twenty-five years from now, but right then and there, struck by lightning while her granddaddy gave his sermon from the pulpit.
It would get so bad, she’d tell her aunt she needed to use the bathroom, and instead of going to the outhouse, the demon child would head into the trees, running through them until she was deep enough to hear the music drifting down in the shafts of sun.
Music is what had saved her—it allowed her to escape such thoughts, to live in a place where hell and eternal pain didn’t exist. If not for music, she might have gone insane.
The woods suddenly grayed and darkened around us. I stood up, trying to clear the new mood, but it only deepened. When I put my hand on a tree to steady myself, I felt something wrong emanating from its bark. Dread seeped in like a cold liquid.
Tate looked at me with fear. He could feel it, too. “We need to change locations. Let’s go to my house.”
We fled the way we came, desperate to outrun whatever had descended over the woods. When I looked back, a thick fog obscured our trail, and the outline of a figure stood in the cloud, watching me. I ran faster.
When we finally returned to the field, I saw Tate’s house shining on the hill. This would be our sanctuary.
Inside, the living room was a velvet-lined, wood-ribbed whale, and we settled into its cushioned belly with weary relief. The walls inhaled… and exhaled.
Tate put on Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” I lay back in a pile of pillows and let the blues soak me through.
I became the demon child again, lying awake after bedtime, sandwiched between two of my cousins with a thin blanket spread over us. I could smell the older boys in the next bed over.
I lay there and touched the skin on my neck, searching for comfort. I didn’t have a special blanket or a stuffed animal I could stroke and soothe myself with. I only had my own body, so I rubbed my soft neck skin between my fingers and sucked on my tongue.
I reached for a memory that I saved for the real bad times, afraid overuse would wear it too thin:
It was dark, and I was warm and wet.
And then, out of the blackness, there was a sound. It vibrated against my body.
Then it entered me, filling up my head and chest like a yellowroot unfurling in spring. It felt so good. Better than anything I’d ever experienced.
It was my mother, singing to me while I was still inside her belly. My first music.
I started to hum the tune, and Tate turned off the record player. I sang what I remembered:
Baby, don’t be ’fraid
When I leave too soon
Baby, don’t be ’fraid
I’ll be your moon
Baby, don’t be ’fraid
When the white dog moan
Baby, don’t be ’fraid
You’ll nev’r be alone
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
Tate leaned over and brushed his thumb across my wet cheek. I almost never cried, especially in front of people. It was much easier to keep it inside and heat it to steam, let it escape as anger.
“What was that? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything so sad and beautiful.”
“My mama used to sing it… it must be some folk song.” But as I said this, I wondered if that was true.
The lyrics were so specific, so clearly made for a cursed woman speaking to her child, knowing she will soon leave them, and that one day, they, too, will suffer.
The song conferred a haunting comfort, a tenderness meant for a demon child.
Perhaps it was written by my mother, or my grandmother, or my great-grandmother.
The tears continued to flow, and I let them drip warmly down the sides of my face into the rug.
“I’m so scared, Tate. I don’t want to die.”
There was a beat of silence, and then he said, “I used to be scared of death. I would think about it all the time, and it almost made me want to die, just so I didn’t have to worry about it anymore.” He looked away. “But then, in school, I read something that helped me move beyond it.”
He got up on his knees and unbuttoned his own shirt this time, revealing a pale, hairy chest covered in thin ridges. I sat up to get closer, and I saw that they were words carved into his skin and healed into white scars. I traced them lightly with my finger. All together, they said, Amor Fati.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“It is a saying of the Stoics. It means to love one’s fate. It reminds me to welcome all of life’s experiences, good and bad. Even death.”
“But how can you love your fate if you know you’re headed to hell?”
He let go of his shirt and let the fabric hang down over his chest. “How do you know you’re going to hell?”
I got on my knees so we were eye to eye. “So you don’t believe me, huh?”
“What I’m saying,” he explained, “is even if this curse is in your family, and you’re certain you’re going to die at 33, how do you know you’re going to hell afterward?”
I thought back to the first time I ever heard about the curse.
It was my fifth birthday, and a neighbor who doted on me brought me a cake and got everyone to sing. I’d never gotten so much attention, and I’m sure I was beaming with it.
After she left, my uncle got into his secret stash and tied one on. He could barely stand as he roamed the house, looking for something to torture.
Us kids knew to make ourselves scarce, but it was oddly cold that night.
My shoes were worn to holes at the bottom, and I imagined my feet turning to ice if I escaped to the woods.
When I tried to join the others in the various hiding spots around the house—the cellar, the space under their parents’ bed, my aunt’s bureau—they wouldn’t let me nestle in with them. They said there wasn’t room.
So I stood in the middle of the kitchen with my small five-year-old body and dared him to do his worst. If I couldn’t hide, I sure as hell wouldn’t cower.
When I didn’t scamper, he got angry. He lunged at me slow and sloppy, and I dodged him easily. He tried again, and I dodged him again. He peered at me with bloodshot eyes and said, “You think you’re real special, don’t ya? That lady only felt sorry for you, ’cause she knows where you’re headed.”
I looked at him curiously, and he said, “Everybody knows that the women in your mama’s family are cursed.
They all die at 33 of some gruesome accident—just like your mama.
” He leaned in closer, and his voice went low, like he was telling a ghost story.
“And it’s all because one of your kin from way back made a deal with the devil.
Traded her soul so she could sing like an angel.
” He grabbed my wrist with his meaty hand.
“Your mama and your grandmama and all those other ladies are in hell right now, burning alive. And one day…” He paused, bringing his mouth right up to my ear. “You’re gonna join them.”
I knew my uncle liked to torture things just for fun, and I shouldn’t pay him any mind.
But deep in my gut, I knew he was right.
I was the demon child, and I was damned to hell, just as my mother had been.
I saw the place I imagined in church, the place where the only music was a terrible sound.
I saw my mother there, the house dress from the only picture I had of her set aflame.
“The devil owns my soul. Where else would I go?” I said to Tate.
“I don’t know. I just have a hard time believing you are destined for hell. When you sing, it’s like I can see God’s light pouring out of you.”
It was true that since I was a girl, I had also felt the Lord with me. The devil might have given me my voice, but it was God who sent me music.
I didn’t know how to fit these two ideas into who I was or what I was destined for; perhaps as a damned girl, a demon child, God took the greatest pity on me.
Maybe he even had a big, grand plan for me, and one day all of the ecstasy and sorrow would come together in one striking image, and I’d see what He’d intended.
Perhaps all I needed was to let go, as Tate had. Love my fate. Welcome the good with the bad and watch it unfold.
It was dark when Tate dropped me off at home. We were two travelers at the end of a long journey; there was nothing left to say. We nodded at each other, and then I walked inside.
I’d come back down to earth from the LSD, but things were still a little cockeyed. I lay down on the couch and tried to sleep, but the brocade pattern kept pestering me. The world wouldn’t let me turn off.
I must have drifted off at some point because I woke to a hammering on my door. It was early evening in spring, and the smell of wet daffodils wafted through the screen window. When I looked at the brocade, it stayed mercifully still.
Another knock came at the door.
I opened it, and there was Tate. It felt natural that he should be there, like the next chord in the song of my life.
We both reached out and brought our palms together, testing reality.
I felt none of the drug now, but our connection was still there, a luscious vibration where our skin met.
I wanted to feel more of it, and so I snaked my arms inside of his jean jacket and pushed my hands beneath his shirt to his warm, bare back.
He did the same, and we stood there, clutching one another under our clothes.
I looked up at the dark-blue sky over his shoulder, and I heard something in the distance. At first it was just a little tinkle in my brain, and then it got louder and more complex, and my body shivered as it crackled through me like an electrical current.
It was a new song. A special one. About a cursed woman, searching for a bit of light.