Sacred Country

by Rose Tremain

  Audrey and Bill C. Pike believe I’m an ordinary man, not an imaginary one. Their black maid, Lois, cleans my room. I have none of Mary’s possessions left. My underwear comes from Burton’s. I wear a silk scarf, folded into a pad, inside my blue Y-fronts. I own seven of these scarves, some spotted, some paisley. The feel of silk in the groin is civilised.

  Bill C. found me a job in a supermarket. I pack groceries into brown paper bags for the customers and carry the bags out to their cars. Some of the cars are pink, with white steering wheels.

  I earn a very small wage. I rely on free food and on tips. It’s January. The cars slither about on the parking lot. When the rain falls, it turns to glass. Sometimes the customers’ hands are too frozen to give me the tip. But I’m always polite. I wear a Russian fur hat, with the flaps down over my ears. I touch the hat in a kind of salute. The people here like things to be formal. They like everyone to know his place and to stay in it.

  I take the food back to Audrey and she makes peculiar meals with it: Black Eye Bean Soup and Corn Bread and meat in oyster sauce. She says: ‘In my mind, Martin, I sometimes cook for the boys I never had. That’s how crazy I can get.’

  She isn’t crazy at all. She sews normally. She doesn’t caress the sewing machine. Her hair is brown and neat. She’s the kind of woman anyone would like to have as a mother. Even Lois loves her. She brings her paintings of dinosaurs her children have made at school and Audrey says: ‘Why, how enchanting, Lois, and how kind.’ She tapes them to the side of the refrigerator so that Bill C. and I can admire them.

  My own drawing has ceased. I drew Vietnam for such a long time that I can’t remember how to do ordinary things. And the war’s over at last. A nation can get so tired of something that it wants to drown in the Sea of Forgetfulness and be reborn pink and innocent like a car. I can understand that.

  The second thing I remember when I wake, after I’ve looked at the furniture, is that my father is no longer alive.

  I get up then. I take a shower. I start my day. I listen out for sounds of life: for Lois arriving, for Bill C. singing in the bath, for Audrey switching on the radio in the kitchen. I draw back my curtains and look out at the morning. I feel a kind of happiness coming on.

  When the news came, I memorised the words. I locked them into my mind for ever. I felt a quickening inside me.

  It was Cord who wrote. The letter was in green ink and free of Wincarnis stains. The words I memorised were these: ‘It seems it wasn’t an accident. He shot the dog first. Then he blew his head away.’

  ‘He blew his head away.’ Safe in my memory now, for always.

  So then I get on a bus and go to work. It’s nearly always the same bus driver. He says: ‘Mornin’, Sir. How y’all today?’ And every morning, without fail, I am moved by this and I say: ‘Fine.’

  At the supermarket, people are less friendly. It’s cold in there. The checkout women wear mittens. They don’t think of the grocery packers as being part of the staff. We’re invisible to them. They gossip to each other. They discuss TV programs and nail hardening products and men. They leave us out.

  I don’t mind. I’m not in search of friends and confidences. I’m concentrating on being. I live each hour, one by one. My mind is quiet and still. I’m no longer waiting for time to pass.

  The only person I’ve got to know at the supermarket is called Les Chesney. He’s in charge of in-store hygiene. His job is to wander about, looking for cockroaches and inspecting the fingernails of the counter staff. Everybody loathes him except me. He has the power to fire a meat packer for not wearing a hairnet. He has fat, clean hands and a weight problem. He’s referred to as ‘Les Ches’. I don’t know why I like him, except that when I heard him called ‘Les Ches’ I remembered Sterns saying: ‘It’s the name that breaks your heart.’

  Sometimes I go to a bar with Les Ches after work and drink Mexican beer. He says: ‘I used to play ice-hockey, Martin. Then my left tibia got smashed and that was it.’

  I say: ‘I’m sorry, Les.’

  He says: ‘I had a wife back then and a leatherette suite. I was thin.’

  I say: ‘The past is another country. The past is Atlantis.’

  He says: ‘Excuse me, Mart, Atlantis was a city not a country.’

  ‘Whatever,’ I say, ‘it doesn’t matter. The point is, it’s no longer there.’

  ‘I dunno,’ he says. ‘I refuse to give up on it. I do crash diets from time to time. I write letters to my ex. I even get dreams about furniture.’

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I don’t think it’s wise, Les.’

  ‘Why not? I had a nice life then. I knew who I was. Don’t you sometimes want your past back?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Never.’

  Les’s eyes are small and tucked deep into his face. He has trouble staring.

  ‘I guess,’ he says, ‘if you’re from England you got so much darn past all around ya, you just can’t face adding to it. That right?’

  I smile. I say: ‘That’s one way of seeing it.’ I buy Les another beer and he says: ‘You’re a nice person, Martin. You’re like people used to be.’

  Then I go back to one of Audrey’s meals. The only thing she makes that I can’t stand is turnip greens. They have a sour taste. Everything we eat is dead but turnip greens are the only food I can think of that tastes of death. I apologise to Audrey. She says: ‘No need to ’pologise. We all have our likes and dislikes. Walter, now, he loved my greens. Didn’t he, Bill C.? Remember that?’

  Walter loved this room. He wrote me a letter describing it and its view of the vegetable garden and the shade trees. He told me about the scarlet birds.

  Then he didn’t write again and I thought it’s all starting now, the disappointment, the failed hopes. But I was wrong. He was too busy to write, that’s all. He was too busy writing songs in Bentwater’s motor home and falling in love and saving for his rhinestone jacket. He was walking round second-hand car lots, stroking Chevrolets. By the time I arrived at 767 he was out of here and living where he lives now, on First Avenue, with Skippy Jean Maguire.

  I didn’t recognise him. I saw this tall man dressed in snakeskin and glitter. His hair was going grey. He came to the door whistling. Behind him in the living room was a thin girl in a tight dress lying on the floor, smoking.

  I said: ‘Walter?’

  He gaped at me. Gaping, he looked more like his former self.

  He said: ‘Jesus! Mary?’

  ‘Martin,’ I said.

  He turned and called out to the thin girl. ‘Sky!’ he called. ‘Come here! We’ve got a visitor from the old country.’

  He calls her ‘Sky’. Whenever they’re together, which is nearly all the time, his big hands are caressing some part of her – her ear, her neck, her hair, her foot. She leans against him, smiling. She rests her body on his, like he was a chair. Sometimes she looks as though she could drop off into a beautiful sleep.

  She told me how they met. She said: ‘It was in Fay May’s. After the Friday night Opry, ’fore the Opry moved out to Opryland. It was love at first glance, wasn’t it, Walter?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Walter. ‘I’d been watching you all evening.’

  ‘Oh that’s right,’ she said. ‘He’d been watching me. So you can’t say “first glance” can you, ’cause he glanced at me before I glanced at him, okay?’

  ‘And then?’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ said Sky. ‘You ever been in love, Martin?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Then you know how it is, okay? I don’t have to describe it. But I will go right ahead and describe it anyway, right?

  ‘We were just drinkin’ an’ all and Walter, he comes and sits by me and the darn near-first thing he says to me is: “Are you right now married to anybody?” I didn’t answer. I didn’t say yes or no. I told him he had a speaking voice like no other I’d ever heard ’cept in the movies when you get an English sea-captain or spy or somethin’. I said I was mesmerised by his voice. That’s the word I used: “mesmerised
”. And that was it then, wasn’t it, Walter? That was the beginning of everything right bang there and then.’

  I spend time with them on Sundays. Sky cooks brown shrimp in butter in a skillet and we eat the shrimp with bread and beer. It’s a delicious meal. Sometimes Bentwater Bliss is there. When I met him, he said: ‘I quit singing, now, Martin. I’m too old to sing. I’m an agent now and, I tell ya, the sound that Walter and Sky make together is the prettiest sound I ever had the good fortune to hear. And now it’s all starting to happen for them here in Nashville.’

  They’ve formed themselves into a singing duo. The first name Walter thought up was ‘Earth and Sky’. Bentwater said: ‘You can’t do that, Walt. ’Less you want the whole world to think Earth’s your name.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Walter.

  ‘You gotta practise minding, then,’ said Bentwater. ‘Earth just ain’t a thing you can call yourself.’

  So this is what they chose: ‘Swaithey and Sky’.

  I said nothing.

  Walter looked at me. He knew what my thoughts were. He said: ‘It’s just a name, Martin. It begins with S.’

  When spring comes I stare at all the blossom along Twenty-First Avenue and get a longing for something I can’t name.

  Then I do name it. As I walk through the empty parking lot, I name it. It’s a longing to be out of the city. It’s a longing to hear a river or hear silence. Only that.

  At the weekend I say to Audrey: ‘Is Tennessee a beautiful State?’

  ‘Beautiful State?’ she says. ‘Let me tell you, Martin, this is one of the loveliest states in the Union. You get on a bus headed south toward Franklin an’ you’ll see.’

  I get on a coach like a Greyhound Bus. The coach radio is playing the kind of songs Walter used to live for before he started living for Skippy Jean Maguire.

  I’d bought a ticket to Franklin, but I ask the driver to tell me when we’re in the middle of nowhere and to set me down there.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘What kinda nowhere do you want, Sir? Fields? Woods? Parkland? I gotta know what kind.’

  ‘Fields,’ I say.

  ‘Not a suicide, are ya?’

  ‘No.’

  Okay,’ he says. ‘I got it. I know the place.’

  ‘The place is a valley. On either side of the road are poplars. Beyond the poplars are fields of green corn and beyond them, sloping grasslands fanning out and up in a bowl towards a rim of forest. There’s a track running by the side of the maize field. On the verge, pecking by a poplar root, is a solitary hen.

  I set off along the track. The hen follows me. I see it running along, trying to catch me up. It thinks I’m going to lead it home.

  The day is what Les Chesney would call ‘pretty’. He means fair, beautiful, cloudless. He said: ‘When I was married, Martin, it’s like all the days were pretty then.’

  I’m wearing the high boots made of tough hide Walter helped me choose. In them I feel tall. I swagger.

  I swagger on up the track with my companion, the hen. It’s a Rhode Island Red. I recognise its scarlet comb.

  The track turns left where the grasslands begin. I stop. The hen turns left and runs faster. I can hear a dog barking so I know that eventually the track leads to a farm.

  I go on up the grass slopes. I can see the house now, in the distance, sheltered by trees. It’s the only house in the valley and I suspect that whoever owns it owns all the land as far as anyone can see. He is in paradise; only, his TV reception is poor.

  I sit down on the springy grass. I light a cigarette and look around at all the beauty there. I think to myself, in the summer there’ll be work on the farms, picking fruit. That kind of work makes you strong.

  I stare at the roof of the house.

  Some time after the important letter, the one I’d memorised and locked inside me, Cord had written with some more news. He said: ‘The farm has gone. The house went to people from London. They’re tearing it down. They’re going to put some other version of it there. The mortgage is paid off.

  ‘Grace Loomis bought the land. She’s farming turkeys on it. She’s building a meat factory. She has a ruddy great fleet of lorries delivering to supermarkets all over the country.

  ‘Your mother’s here, in Gresham Tears, with me. Hard to say who’s taking care of whom. The thing is, Martin, I’m getting so bloody old.’

  So I let myself think of her, sometimes. Now that my father’s dead; now that she’s with Cord; now that Timmy and Pearl are a long way away.

  When things are slack at the store or when I’m alone in my room at 767 watching the birds flying in and out of the shade trees, I imagine her. And now, here in this valley, smoking a Marlboro, I think of her sitting by the fire, or out by the porch helping Cord to prune the Albertine.

  She is young, in my mind. Her hair is still black and long, falling thickly round her face.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  1976

  Martin:

  Walter and Sky are trying to get married, or rather, what they’re trying to do is locate Sky’s first husband so that she can divorce him and marry Walter. She says to me: ‘He was always elusive, Martin. He was always slithering away someplace.’

  Now he’s slithered away into the blue. He used to work on the river boats and he’s probably on a river somewhere but they’ve no idea which one. They’re sending letters to river boat companies all over the South. There are more rivers in the United States than in any other continent on earth.

  Happiness is making Walter fat. He can’t fasten his rhinestone jacket, but he doesn’t care. ‘Swaithey and Sky’ have been signed up by a record company called TMS Records. I’d never heard of it. It’s not exactly Decca. I say to Walter: ‘What does TMS stand for?’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I dunno.’

  Sky says: ‘What it stands for doesn’t matter. It’s like WSM 650, the radio station. That got started by an insurance company an’ their slogan was “We Shield Millions” so they decided their call-sign would be WSM. Now, hardly anyone remembers the “We Shield Millions” thing. You see what I’m saying? WSM has become a kind of word.’

  ‘But it stood for something once,’ I say.

  Sky thinks I’m a pedantic person, needing everything explained. She says: ‘TMS could be anything. It could be Tuna Mayonnaise Sandwich. It could be ToMorrow is Sunday. The point is, it doesn’t matter. What matters is they’ve signed us.’

  Bentwater has got his hair blowdried. He’s cut down on the whiskey. He’s fumigated his motor home. He says to me: ‘We’re hitting it now, Mart. Success. We’re kickin’ down the door. And all of us gotta stay sharp.’

  I tell Audrey and Bill C. what’s going on. They’ve never heard of TMS Records. Bill C. says: ‘Tell Walter to watch his back. Leopards don’t change their spots.’

  But Walter pays no attention. The only thing that can make him depressed is thinking about Pete.

  Pete told him in a letter that his bus is surrounded by wire fencing on three sides. Beyond the wire are turkeys. There are more than a thousand of them. Pete is hemmed in with their gobble-gabbling noise and their stench. He put: ‘I’m going mad. If the bus could still move, I’d just drive away.’

  ‘What can I do?’ Walter asks me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I reply.

  ‘I’ve got to do something but I can’t think what. I owe my life to Pete.’

  I tell him I’ll think about it. I say: ‘Out where I am now, I do a hell of a lot of thinking.’

  Where I am is on Judge Riveaux’s farm.

  It’s a farm given over to three things: to hogs, to summer fruit and to birds. The birds are: peacocks, guineafowl, turkeys, pheasants, chickens, geese and doves. They run and flap and fly all over everything, everywhere. The peacocks live on the roof. Sometimes they walk into the kitchen. The thing the late Mrs Riveaux loved most was all these living and wandering birds.

  Bentwater Bliss found me my job. I told him I wanted to leave the grocery store and work in the country,
picking fruit or beans. He said straight away: ‘I’ll call the Judge. He’s lookin’ for someone. Miz Riveaux, she used to run that place single-handed with just that old Jeremiah Hill to help her. The Judge thought he could do what she did. He figured, Hell, she was a woman! I can do whatever she did and in half the time. But he can’t. It’s got him baffled why, but he can’t.’

  So Bent drove me out here. The house is white board with a shingled roof. It has four wood-burning stoves to warm it. There’s no garden, just as there was no real garden at Swaithey. The farm starts at the back door. There are barns for the hogs in winter and right by the barns the low brick house where Jeremiah Hill lives with his family. Beyond the bean fields is a creek, with an old canoe tied up. On the other side of the creek is a wood full of beeches, chestnuts, hickories and live oaks. The doves are pinkish-grey. They live in a white dovecot on a pole.

  Judge Riveaux speaks so softly you can hardly hear what he says. You wonder how he used to make himself understood in court.

  When I arrived with Bent, Jeremiah’s wife, Beulah, had made tea and a pineapple cake. Jeremiah and Beulah are black. They have twins, aged seven, called Lettie and Glorie, short for Violette and Gloria. Jeremiah is fifty-five and Beulah is thirty-one. He had another wife in the past, from whom he slithered away.

  We sat down with the tea and cake. The Judge looked at me with quiet brown eyes. He said: ‘You were born on a farm, Martin. That it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘In Suffolk, England. It’s stony soil. The first thing I can remember is picking stones.’

  ‘Most of Tennessee is red clay. Good and rich. You can grow ’most anything in the Tennessee earth. But my wife, she used to have a gift for makin’ things grow and I don’t have that. You either have that or you don’t have it. One or the other.’

  ‘We used to keep birds,’ I said suddenly.

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes. Hens. Guineafowl. I had a pet guineafowl I named Marguerite.’

  ‘Well, now. Mrs Riveaux, she thought birds were just the finest thing, didn’t she, Bent?’