by Lee Smith
“Nothing,” I said. I backed off, and he pulled the light chain and lay back down.
“Get in the bed, Katie,” he said, but I wouldn’t put her down, and in a minute I could tell by his breathing that he’d gone back to sleep.
I took Annie May in the bathroom and put her blanket down in the tub and let her stay there with me sitting on the bathroom floor beside her, sponging her whole body off with a damp washcloth from time to time to try and bring the fever down. This seemed to work. Finally she started resting easier after a while, and breathing better. Finally it started getting light outside, and then the alarm went off and Hank got up and dressed for work in a hurry. He came in the bathroom and leaned over and kissed me. I could tell he felt real bad about how he had acted, even though he didn’t say anything about it, men just can’t sometimes.
“I think she’s some better,” I said.
“Well, you’d better get Virgie to drive you to the doctor anyway,” Hank said, so then I knew he was sorry, and I said I would.
But the first thing I did after he went out to catch the streetcar was go upstairs and get Miss Lumpkin, who came to the door with her gray hair hanging down to her waist, and I realized that she must have been real pretty, years and years ago. This shocked me.
I asked Miss Lumpkin if she would come and take another look at Annie May, and she said, “Why, what’s wrong with Annie May?” and then I knew Hank had been lying.
“She’s sick,” I said, “she’s been real sick.” And not five minutes later, Miss Lumpkin was there, all professional-looking with her gray hair wound up in a bun now under her starched white cap. I was embarrassed to have her see the unmade bed, yet she walked past it without a glance and picked up Annie May, who was sleeping deeply by then, a good sign, I thought.
Miss Lumpkin looked at me with her clear gray eyes and said, “This baby needs to see the doctor. Now I’ll just sit right here with her”—she sat in the rocking chair—“while you gather some things together, Katie, and we’ll take her right down to the hospital. It’s always best to see the doctor.” Her voice was bright, false, professional.
I couldn’t hardly think. I packed up a sack with baby clothes and toys, diapers, the blanket Mamma had crocheted and sent in the mail, Annie May’s little silver cup from Hank’s mamma. Then I picked up my purse and my guitar case.
“You won’t need that, honey,” she said. “But get yourself a sweater or a coat,” which I did, and we left.
They took her away from me at the hospital and did some tests, which took about two hours. I sat in the waiting room and bummed cigarettes from the other people waiting there too, and vomited twice in the bathroom. It didn’t even occur to me to call anybody, Virgie or Georgia or Hank.
Finally Miss Lumpkin came back out with two doctors.
Annie May had polio.
They said she would need to stay in the hospital for some time, and it might be months before we would know the extent of the damage. They said a lot of other stuff too, but I couldn’t take it all in. Then they led me back to where they had put her in a crib in a room with three other babies in it, under a bright white light that stayed on, I would learn, day and night. There was a chair beside her crib. I could stay for a while. There were certain hours every day when I could visit, and sit in the chair, and hold her. I couldn’t hold her that first day, though. I sat there and somebody brought me a cup of coffee and a newspaper. I looked at the date on the newspaper. December 18, 1948. Annie May was nearly seven months old.
I sat there until they told me I had to leave, that I could come back in the afternoon, and again at night if I wished to. So I went and called Virgie down at the radio station, where I knew they’d be just finishing up Ed Barr’s Breakfast Club.
“Where the hell have you been?” Virgie said. Then I told her, and she said she’d be right there.
It was cold, but I sat out on the steps of the hospital and waited for Virgie, watching people go in and out of the door. I felt light-headed and funny, like everybody was staring at me. Once an ambulance pulled up with its bell clanging, and they wheeled a bloody man on a stretcher in through the double doors. Once a big young Negro man nearly knocked me down, pushing a wheelchair into my shoulder. Some boys about my age walked past on the sidewalk and paused to light a cigarette, staring at me. They were staring at me! Then, just as Virgie squealed up to the curb in the big white Oldsmobile, I looked down at myself and realized why they were all staring at me—because I still had on my Raindrop outfit, the red-and-white-checkered dress buttoned up wrong, those big black clodhopper boots. I looked like country come to town. Behind me, in the hospital, my little Annie May lay sleeping beneath those bright-bright lights. Virgie slammed out of the car and ran up to hug me tight. She smelled, as usual, like cigarettes and perfume and gin. “Oh Katie, it’ll be all right,” she said, but I knew it would not.
3
The Last Barn Dance
The Raindrops busted up in Charlotte in 1953, when we were working the old Dixie Jamboree radio show out of WBT. Now I have to say, I had not been a Raindrop for that whole time. Hank left me as soon as he found out that Annie May had polio, he never even went to see her in the hospital. He went back to Danville, and his mother sent me a check for three hundred dollars along with a little note on her monogrammed notepaper which I did not bother to read, and this is the last I ever heard from either of them, although later a Danville lawyer sent a piece of paper to Mamma saying that I had been annulled. I didn’t care. I was glad to be annulled!
Anyway, I did try to work while Annie May was in the hospital, but I was just too wrought up, so finally I quit trying, and as soon as she was well enough, I took her back home to Grassy Branch, where I thought we could live with Mamma and Mamma Tampa, and they would help me take care of her. It was all I could think of to do.
But I had not been in that house two months before I saw that it would never work, that I’d go stark raving mad there.
Nothing had changed. Not one thing.
It was Mamma and Mamma Tampa still sitting around in the dark stringing beans, and Mamma going off to church every time they cracked the church door, and trying to get me to do the same, and then, when she was out of the house, Mamma Tampa would follow me around and tell me endless crazy stories in her whispery old voice.
I loved some of them, though, I have to say, like this one she told me about her and Durwood driving all the way down to Key West, Florida, years ago. She said they swam off of a pink sand beach and drank rum out of coconuts with people from New York City. Then she held up her finger like a warning. “Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” she said, all excited, and before you could say scat, she was digging in the bottom of the closet and darn if she didn’t come up with a big old conch shell I had never seen before. “Ssh!” she said. She pressed it up to her ear, listening hard, and then the most beautiful look came over her face.
“Mamma Tampa, what do you hear in there?” I asked.
“Why, honey, hit’s the ocean!” she said. “Here. Listen to it.”
But when I pressed the conch shell up to my ear, I couldn’t hear a thing. Nothing.
I left her there in the bedroom listening to the ocean while I carried Annie May down the hill and caught a ride with Pancake on down to see Rose Annie and Little Virginia. Little Virginia always pepped me up, but Rose Annie just didn’t seem to be as happy as she ought to be. That nervous breakdown had left her with some permanent brain damage, or depression, or something. She seemed so sad all the time, like a washed-out version of the girl she used to be. I couldn’t adjust to the new Rose Annie. It depressed me, along with everything else up on Grassy Branch.
When I told them about Mamma Tampa and the conch shell, they just nodded. Everybody knew what Mamma Tampa was like. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay up there or not,” I said, and they nodded again, and Rose Annie came over and hugged me. I could feel her shoulder blades sticking out like little wings underneath her shirt.
So leaving was on my mind already when the postcard came from Virgie saying that her and the Raindrops had moved from Richmond to Charlotte to be on the Dixie Jamboree, and Ernestine Dodd was quitting the act, and wouldn’t I like to reconsider.
I started thinking about it. I started reconsidering.
For one thing, by that time I was not so scared about taking care of Annie May. She was a year old then, and though she had never talked and we didn’t know if she ever would or not, she was crawling all around and pulling up on things with her good arm, and had even taken a step or two. She wore a little brace from the knee down on her bad leg. I was taking her to the hospital at Holly Springs every three weeks so they could change the size of the brace as she grew. And I have to say, every time I took Annie May over there, or anywhere else for that matter, everybody marveled at her, at how sweet she was, all smiles and giggles. See, she didn’t know she’d had polio. She didn’t know she was crippled.
That summer I’d sit out with her for hours on end in this little red plastic wading pool, and we had a big time. I began to realize that she’d live, that she would grow up, that I could raise her after all. I started thinking more about Charlotte, about the fine hospitals I was sure they must have there. You know they’d beat Holly Springs Memorial!
One summer day I was sitting out in the wading pool when Buster Yates came around in a truck to install a washing machine. I used to know him in high school, now he worked for B. T. Goforth Appliances. Anyway, Buster got out of the truck and said, “Hey, sweetie,” to Annie May, who looked up at him and giggled. Then he asked me right out if I’d like to go hear some music over at that new place on the highway outside of Holly Springs.
“Aren’t you married?” I asked.
“Not really,” he said, and when I kept on looking up at him he sort of ducked his head and blushed. “I’m kind of transitional,” he mumbled.
Well, that was good enough for me. All of a sudden I was sick of that house, and ready to have some fun. Buster had a handlebar mustache and sideburns, which I have always liked. I like a lot of hair on a man. So we made our plans, but when Saturday night came around, Mamma flat-out refused to baby-sit for Annie May. She announced that she had talked it over with Mr. Bledsoe her preacher, and that in his opinion—and hers, she was real clear about this—Annie May’s polio was a direct judgment on me from God for what I’d done.
“What did I do?” I asked.
“Why, you know,” Mamma said, pinching her lips together.
Mamma Tampa was not in on this conversation—she sat in the other room, listening to the radio.
“I don’t know either,” I said, feeling all of a sudden like my old feisty self again. “What do you mean, Mamma?”
“Why, leaving home thataway,” Mamma said, “and living in sin. Don’t you reckon I can count, Katie?” meaning, she’d been over her counting the months, seeing how long it was between Christmas when I got married and May when Annie May was born. “I’m not about to help you get up to none of your old tricks again, Miss Priss, not with this poor cripple baby to take care of.”
“Very well,” I said, and then I called Buster and told him I couldn’t make it, and then I called Little Virginia and asked her if she’d give me a ride into Holly Springs to catch the bus to Charlotte.
“Shoot, I’ll drive you to Charlotte,” Little Virginia said. “I have always wanted to go to the Dixie Jamboree myself. Don’t you reckon Virgie can get us tickets?”
So we went.
Mamma Tampa stuck her face right up close to mine just before we left and said, “Remember, honey, don’t ever buy nothing but silk hose, and sing the old songs for me.”
“That’s not bad advice,” Little Virginia said when we got in the car, and it’s not, either. But I could see Mamma praying on the porch as we pulled into the road, and it made me mad as fire. I knew for sure that I would never come back home to live again.
“How do you stand it here?” I asked Little Virginia, but she said R.C. was real easy to take care of these days, and she did all his business for him, mostly buying and selling land, and she enjoyed that. She said she’d gotten real good at it. She also said that she planned to start living with her boyfriend, Homer Onslow, if his mother ever died, that Homer was going to move in up there with her and R.C.
“I wouldn’t marry him, though,” Little Virginia went on to say. “Not for two or three years, anyway. I’d wait and see how things went. I’d want to keep my own room, too, of course. You know, you get used to doing things the way you want to do them, and not having to worry about somebody else. Whether they like salt or whether they don’t. Whether they like to leave a light on at night.”
I looked at her good, for it was the first time I’d ever heard a woman say a thing like that. “What do you think R.C. will say, though, if you move Homer in?” I asked.
“What can he say?” Little Virginia snorted. “He don’t even know how to fry an egg.”
We got there in time for the show and just loved it, and so there I was, a Raindrop again!
Virgie found me a real nice baby-sitter for Annie May, actually she was the station manager’s daughter, so that worked out good, but this was the only thing that worked out in Charlotte.
The act was just plain flat without Ernestine Dodd. Georgia and me tried hard of course, but neither her nor me could really fill the gap. Ernestine was a natural cut-up as I said, real antic, and without her, Georgia and me just looked dumb. Or this is how I felt about it, anyway! Georgia had started dating a real nice Charlotte businessman who was somewhat embarrassed by our act, and so she was losing interest fast. She wasn’t ever really cut out for show business, anyway—I mean it wasn’t just flat-out in her blood the way it was with me and Virgie, the way it had been with Mamma Tampa when she was young. For me, I reckon it had something to do with my sad short marriage and with Annie May getting polio—but the fact is, I just couldn’t act corny and silly anymore.
But Virgie refused to change the act. “Oh hell,” she said, “somebody’s got to give folks a good laugh. That’s what they hired us for, honey, in case you’ve forgot it.”
In the meantime I’d been writing some songs of my own, up on Grassy Branch during the time I had not been working, but they were not songs that Mamma Rainette and the Raindrops could sing. I wanted to sing them myself—I wrote them for me, and I dreamed of this—but Virgie said nothing doing, even though me and Georgia both begged her on it. Nor were we allowed to appear on our own outside of the act. I begged her and begged her, for I could have used the extra money, believe me! But she said no.
Of course Virgie was drinking a lot by then, vodka mostly, she thought we couldn’t smell it on her breath, and sometimes she was kind of mean-tempered, and other times she was confused. Another thing that was going on right then was a rumor that they were fixing to put the Jamboree, or part of it anyhow, on television, and so everybody was wondering who would make the cut for TV. I knew for a fact that Virgie had been worrying about it, and with good reason, because she’d already had a few run-ins with the management, and the fact is, she’d actually been fired off of WRVA in Richmond because of coming in drunk one morning on Ed Barr’s Breakfast Club and cussing everybody out on the air. They didn’t use to have that three-second time delay, the way they do now. Live was live, you’d better believe it! It would of been funny if it hadn’t of been so awful.
Anyway, there was a lot of tension in the air, and finally it all blew up, right in the middle of a show.
Now the Dixie Jamboree had kind of a recipe, you might say—all the old-timey radio barn dances did. The only difference among them was the sponsor, and who the emcee was. At the Dixie Jamboree it was Colonel Jack Kyle, who allowed more horseplay onstage than some, and featured more comedy. Why, a new singing group was likely to smell smoke and look down to find lighted matches in the soles of their shoes, which just tickled the audience to death. They loved stuff like that. They loved it when Shorty of Shorty’s Crazy Hillbillies le
t his pants fall down around his feet, or when me and Georgia did the one about walking over the air vent and the wind blew up our crinoline skirts to show our bloomers. Not that you could see much, with those big old bloomers!
Georgia’s boyfriend had told her that he found this joke demeaning (he had gone to Davidson College), which made Virgie see red. So Virgie had blessed him out, up one side and down the other, and because of this, Georgia had decided to quit the act. Only, she hadn’t told Virgie yet. This was the secret she was trying to keep until the end of the month, when they planned to announce their engagement.
Anyway, here’s how it went. First you’d hear the Jamboree theme song, “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” and then Colonel Jack would start out by welcoming everybody, saying, “From the Queen City of the South, in the heart of the Carolinas, it’s eight-thirty Saturday night . . . time for all the boys and girls at the Dixie Jamboree to gather round the microphone and sneak into your hearts with a song or two. Now the first little ditty coming atcha is one the fiddlers kinda shine on . . . and the rest of the fellers twang their guitars and slap the bass fiddle while Ma and Pa and all the younguns join hands and circle round for an old square dance. . . .” Then they’d let loose with something like “Pretty Little Pink” or “The Arkansas Traveler.” Then after that we’d have a western number—you had to have a western number, they were real big then—and then the first Crazy Water Crystals spot.
I swear, I was on the Jamboree for a couple of months before I ever figured out what Crazy Water Crystals actually do—it’s a laxative! Only they didn’t ever come right out and say it. Oh no, Colonel Jack was real high-toned, coming on like this: “Since the beginning of civilization, hydrotherapy—now this is nothing more than the treatment of illness with the element of water—yes, hydrotherapy has been regarded as indispensable in the treatment of physical and mental ills all over the world. For nature has endowed mineral waters with healing properties. In our own America, that water, so richly endowed, is found only in the Crazy Wells in Crazy, Texas. And now, these crystals, formed by evaporation from Crazy Water itself, are available at a price everybody can afford. Simply dissolve Crazy Water Crystals in your drinking water, and let Nature do the rest. If faulty elimination is causing you to suffer from arthritis, bad nerves, upset stomach, liver disease, or kidney problems, the least you can do is rid the body of these toxic impurities that may have accumulated. See for yourself what Nature can do!” Colonel Jack would holler at the end of every Crazy spot. Then he’d always say, “Pucker up your face and keep smiling!” which didn’t make a bit of sense to me. Seems like you would either pucker up your face or you’d keep smiling.
