Chapter 16
Seven months later, on the second Thursday in December, Savannah Holloway woke up in her own bed at the Harpeth House at ten after seven and found that her husband had gotten up early to make breakfast, which was the worst news of the week.
She came down the stairs in his flannel shirt and one sock.
"What is that smell."
"That's breakfast."
"That's a fire."
"That's breakfast," Deacon said, from behind a skillet, "and I'll thank you to sit down at the table like a woman with manners instead of standing in my doorway like a fire marshal."
She sat down at the table. He put a plate in front of her. There were eggs on it and there was a piece of toast on it that had been dead for some time.
"Deacon."
"Eat around it."
"There's no around."
He leaned down and kissed the side of her head, which was a thing he did instead of saying words, and took the toast off her plate and ate it himself standing at the sink, and made a face, and did not say anything about it, and Savannah put her forehead down on the table and laughed until the dog next door started up.
They had gotten a great deal funnier since May. Nobody had warned her about that. She had braced for a year of tiptoeing and had gotten a man who burned toast on purpose to hear her laugh, which she was fairly sure was what was happening and had decided not to investigate.
Here is what the seven months had in them.
They had played twenty-two of the thirty-one buildings.
She picked them on a Monday in May off a routing binder at the kitchen table with a pencil, and she picked hard — no arenas in markets that had never sold a duo ticket, nothing in a shed, nothing that made them drive half a day to lose money on a Tuesday.
Deacon ate the guarantees on the nine she cut.
It cost him a number Odette knew and Savannah had deliberately never asked for, and he had never once said it out loud in front of her, which was, in its way, the single most romantic thing he had ever done.
They closed the run in Fort Worth in October in a building that had held a hold date since the second week of November a year before, back when nobody had called her about it.
The money came in nine days. Eight hundred and twelve thousand dollars, and Odette got the interest too, because Odette gets the interest.
The "Dry County" reissue shipped in June out of a warehouse in Jackson with the credits printed right.
HOLLOWAY, SAVANNAH first on eight of the fourteen.
She bought a copy at a store on Charlotte with her own twenty-nine dollars and sat in the truck in the lot and read the back of it for a long time, and then she bought two more and mailed one to Odette and one to Pearl.
"Rust on the Latch" went to radio in September and had been on the country chart since, climbing slow, the way a song climbs when nobody at a label is angry about it.
She wrote ten songs with Silas Rourke over the summer in a garage in Eastland with the door bricked in, and they cut them in October, and the record comes out in the spring with two names on the front of it in the same size type.
Not with. Not featuring. Silas had a fight with an art department about it and won it in about ninety seconds by hanging up first.
Kinsley Wexler's own record came out in September with her name typed first on all twelve.
Savannah heard three of them in the truck on the way to Dickson and thought two were good and one was better than good.
She felt nothing at all about any of it, and she noticed the nothing the way you notice a tooth that has quit hurting.
And in October, Savannah had bought a building.
The Sylvan Room is a brick box off a side street with a red door and eighty folding chairs in nine crooked rows and a window unit in the back wall that has hummed through everything played in that room for twenty years.
Junie Marsh had run it for eighteen of them without ever owning one brick of it.
In September her landlord put the building on the market with a note in the listing about "development potential," and Junie called Savannah on a Tuesday to say she was going to lose the room and that she was not calling to ask for anything, she was calling because somebody ought to know.
Savannah bought it in nineteen days with the money a definition in an exhibit had taken out of her for nine years.
It took a little over half of it.
The deed was recorded in Davidson County on the twenty-eighth of October in two names. Hers is typed first. Odette did that on purpose and charged for it.
And underneath the deed, filed the same morning, book and page, there is a restrictive covenant that runs with the land.
Odette wrote it in four sentences so plain a claims clerk could not get around them with a running start.
The building stays a listening room. The cover stays ten dollars, cash, in a can.
The clipboard by the door stays twelve lines and the lineup stays first names only.
And no name goes on the building — not a sponsor's, not a bank's, not a foundation's, not Deacon Holloway's, and not Savannah Holloway's.
It binds them, and their estates, and whoever owns it in ninety years. It cannot be waived by agreement, and Savannah made Odette put that in twice.
The only thing they changed inside is a brass plate about the size of a playing card, screwed to the inside face of the red door at eye level, where you can only see it coming in.
NO NAME GOES ON THIS BUILDING
Junie Marsh, who is now on a salary for the first time in her adult life and who is furious about it in a way she brings up roughly once a week, told Savannah it was the tackiest thing she'd ever let anybody do to her door.
She polishes it. Savannah has seen her do it.
The chalkboard went up around six.
Savannah stood in the alley out back with a paper cup of Junie's terrible coffee and watched a sixty-odd-year-old woman with a silver braid and a fanny pack write one word on it in her own hand.
SAVANNAH
"That's it?" Savannah said. "I own the building."
"First names only."
"I own the building, Junie."
"Then you can put whatever you want on your own board," Junie Marsh said, "the day you learn to write."
Eighty seats. Sold out for three weeks. It was the first time in twenty years that room had held eighty, and there were four people standing at the back who had paid ten dollars to stand, and Junie had taken their money out of principle.
Pearl Holloway was in the second row in a good coat with her handbag in her lap, sixty-three years old and not sorry about one thing she had ever done.
Dahlia Prater was in the front row and had already started crying twice and denied both.
Silas Rourke sat in the third row with Ruthie, and Corinne Ledbetter was behind them, and Wade Pruitt was at the back near the board he had refused to touch, on his hands, because Junie Marsh runs the board from a folding chair at the end of the front row and always will.
Deacon Holloway sat in the fourth row.
He had come in the front. He had gotten in line on the sidewalk behind a couple in their twenties, and when he got to the coffee can he put a ten-dollar bill in it, and Junie took it, and gave him a look, and took it.
She played for fifty minutes and it was the best fifty minutes of her working life, and she knew it while it was happening, which almost never happens.
She played four off the drawer. She played "Pilot Light," from a cassette cut in the back room of a hardware store in Culleoka when she was nineteen, with the middle fixed — she went down under her own melody where the fifteen-year-old fix had always been waiting — and she told the room where the tape had been and did not say one word about how it had come back to her, and one man in the fourth row looked at the floor.
She played "Cold Hands" and changed the word back.
Then she moved the mic stand a half inch, which she did not need to do, and said:
"This next one is called 'Hard Water.'"
The room made a small sound. Some of them knew.
"I started it on a paint bucket the winter we bought a house, and then I couldn't finish it for six years, and then I finished it in forty minutes.
" She turned a peg a hair. "It's about my grandmother's well out in Maury County.
Hard water is what you get when there's too much lime in the ground.
It gets into a kettle and it builds up on the inside a layer at a time and it goes so slow that nobody notices anything is happening until the day the pot's lined with it. "
Somebody laughed, low, one row back, the way people do when a thing lands sideways on their own house.
"A publisher offered to put this on a record in June," Savannah said. "A good record. It would have been a single, and a single on that record is a house. I said no, and my publisher asked me why, and I told her the truth, which is that the first voice on this song was going to be mine."
She looked out at eighty people in nine crooked rows.
"I've been holding it since April," she said. "Y'all are it."
Then she played it.
The bridge is eight bars. She had written it for six years with a gap in it for a second voice, and it had never once worked, and the fix had been to take the man out and drop her own low answer in under her own melody — not a harmony, an answer — and she sang those eight bars in a brick room with a window unit humming behind her and made them go exactly where she meant them to go.
Nobody talked during it. Junie looks at you.
When it was over Tobe Whitaker knocked twice on the body of his resonator with his knuckles, which is the highest praise available in that room, and then eighty people stood up in nine crooked rows and the standing was awkward and slow because folding chairs are folding chairs, and it went on a long time anyway.
Savannah drank some water and let them settle.