Chapter 13 #2
"That's the problem," he said, and hung up, and sat in a truck on the shoulder of a state road, and did not entirely know why he had said that or where it had come from, and knew that it was right.
He got home at two in the afternoon and went down to the barn.
There was no lock on it. There had not been one since January, when he cut it off, and he had not replaced it, and it had bothered him every day since and he had done nothing about it.
Inside it was cold enough to see his breath.
He turned the light on.
He had not really been in there — not in there — in maybe four years.
In January he had gone straight to the seventh box on the north wall and straight back out with a photograph, and had not once looked up.
He came to the door, other times. He sat on the crate.
He had spent a decade and a half treating that barn the way you treat a room where somebody else is working.
Now he stood in the middle of it and looked at it properly.
Shelves to the roof on three sides. Boxes numbered in her hand.
The card file, four drawers of it, and he pulled one out and it was full to the back with index cards and every one of them had her writing on it, thousands, going back before he had money, back to when they were buying gas on a card that didn't always work.
There was a countertop oven on the bench with masking tape on the dial.
There were six reels sitting out, in a row, with a card next to them that said TO LOG and a date in December.
Virgil Kilgore stood in the middle of that barn for a while.
Then he went and found the box that says GALLOWAY on it, in her handwriting, on a shelf at the end, on its own.
There was a machine and he knew how to work a machine, more or less, and it took him a half hour and he did not care.
He threaded the two-inch and he ran it from the top.
Second Cutting. Twelve songs. Eleven days in a room in 2009 with everybody playing at once.
He had heard it, obviously. He had heard it in 2010 in a van. He had heard bits of it at parties in the years when people still put it on to be interesting. He had heard the third track at a festival once, over a PA, walking to a bus, and had thought huh, they're playing Amber and kept walking.
He had never once sat down in a room and played it front to back.
He did it now, in a cold barn, in a coat, on a crate, in the afternoon.
It is a great record.
That is the plain fact and he had known it in some upstairs part of himself for seventeen years and had never let it come the whole way down.
It is better than his first four. It is better than most of his.
There is a thing she does on the fifth song, a little late drag on the phrasing, that he has heard three other singers do since and do worse, and he sat on that crate and understood that at least one of them had learned it off this record.
Her voice at twenty-four had no break in it. That was what got him. It came out straight and level and unafraid, and she sang the whole thing like a woman who had not yet been told anything.
Track nine is about her grandmother's house.
He sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging and listened to a twenty-four-year-old woman he had never met sing about a house on Bent Fork Road, and the tape hiss went around the room, and somewhere on the third side of it he started crying and did not particularly notice.
And then he was in Bowling Green.
Not remembering it. In it, the way you get sometimes, all at once and for no reason: the smell of that room, which was old beer and a gas heater; the sound guy who hated him; a dozen chairs and nine people, and he had counted them, he had counted nine, and one of them was a woman at the back who had kept her coat on the whole set.
He had thought she was somebody's ride.
He was thirty-eight years old and he had told his brother on the phone that week that he was going to go work for a man in Bowling Green who sold above-ground pools.
And then the room emptied and he was packing up and there were forty feet of sticky floor between him and the door, and a woman in a coat walked all the way across it.
He remembered exactly what she said. He has never told anybody.
She said: You're better than this room and you're going to have to be told that by somebody who's got nothing to gain, so it's going to have to be me.
And then she said: I've got a tour.
The tape ran out.
The end of a reel makes a sound — it flaps, it goes around and slaps, and it will do that until you get up and stop it, and Virgil Kilgore sat on a crate in a cold barn in Cheatham County and let it slap for about two minutes because he could not move.
Because it had come the whole way down, finally, at fifty-four years old, in the dark, alone, at no cost to anybody but him.
Here it is.
She was better than him. She was better at twenty-four than he has ever been, and he knew it in the van in 2010, and he knew it on the bus, and he had stood in the wings of fifteen-hundred-seat rooms every night of that tour and watched a woman do the thing he could not do, and it had made him sick, and he had married her.
And in 2011 the phone rang and it was over for her.
And he had held her in a motel outside Memphis while she cried, and he had meant every word he said to her that night, every single one, he would take a lie detector on it —
— and underneath it, in the part of a man that does not get spoken to, something had gone quiet and easy and warm.
Relief.
That is the word. He had been looking for another one for a month and there isn't one. He had felt relief. His wife's life had ended on a Tuesday and some animal in the floor of him had rolled over and gone back to sleep, because now there was going to be one of them.
He said it out loud in the barn, to nobody, in the dark, with the tape still slapping.
"I was glad."
He sat there a long time after that.
There was nobody to tell. That was the shape of it and he turned it over and could not find a way out.
He could not tell her — she was gone, she was in a rented house in Inglewood with somebody else's curtains, and if he drove over there tonight and said this to her it would be a gift, it would be the biggest one yet, he'd be handing her his own worst thing with a bow on it and asking her to be moved by it.
He could not tell Lonnie, because he had ended Lonnie that morning at nine fifteen.
And two weeks ago in Logan County he had lain eighteen inches from her in the dark with her hand on his chest, which is the closest he has been to her since December, and he had stopped it, and he would stop it again tomorrow, and he had spent every night since going over the four seconds where she sat up on the edge of that bed with her back to him and said well, that's new in a voice like a door closing.
So not her either. Not with this. He had already spent the one night he was ever going to get to hand her something in the dark, and he had spent it saying no, and it would be a poor kind of man who turned around two weeks later and cashed it in.
There was, in point of fact, nobody. Fifty-four years old, nine thousand people who love him, four who know him, and he had spent two years giving the whole of himself to a woman from New York with a camera because it was free.
He got up at last and stopped the machine and rewound the reel and put it back in the box, and put the box back on the shelf at the end, on its own, where she keeps it.
He turned the light off and slid the door and stood there in the yard looking at the empty hasp.
Then he went up to the house and got a new lock out of the drawer, a good one, and went back down and put it on, and left the key in it.