“You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,” Elvis cajoles, trying to shush the Scream. “Cryin’ all the time.” He croons, “Are you lonesome tonight?”
“EEEEEE,” says the Scream.
“Hey, baby,” Elvis says. “I ain’t askin’ much of you. No no no no no no no no. Don’t be a stingy little mama. You ’bout to starve me half to death. Just a big-a big-a big-a hunk o’ love will do.”
The Scream is fixing to scream again, so Elvis tries a different tack. He says, “Bugsy turned to Shifty, and he said ‘nix nix!’” Elvis’s knees begin to roll; then his pelvis begins its customary swivel, his left leg working like a bit brace. “Everybody let’s rock!” he cries.
Slowly, the Scream begins to undulate. Its lips are like a volcano when it’s hot. It feels its temperature rising, higher and higher, burning through to its soul. Its brain is flaming. It doesn’t know which way to go. It’s burning, burning, and nothing to cool it. It just might turn to smoke. The flames are now licking its body. It feels like it’s slipping away. It’s hard to breathe. Its chest is a-heaving. Its burning love is lighting the morning skies. It’s just a hunk-a hunk-a burning love.
The Scream reaches for the scarf around the King’s neck.
“EEEEEEEE!” it says.
“I’m proud to say that you’re my buttercup,” Elvis gasps.
I am smiling. If rock and roll will never die, can spring be far behind?
Hear My Song
Featured in the New Yorker, March 20, 1995
It wasn’t the books that I didn’t read,
It wasn’t the teachers who tried to teach me,
It wasn’t that varsity baseball coach
Who kept on telling them locker-room jokes.
It was Bobbie Ann Mason, back in high school.
She was way too cute, she was way too cool.
How was I gonna get an education
Sittin’ right in back of Bobbie Ann Mason?
—Rick Trevino, singing on
Columbia Records’ Looking for the Light
O.K. How many people do you know with their own theme song? How many people have you even heard of whose full names are also song titles? John Wesley Harding? Pretty Boy Floyd? Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle did have songs named for them, but not many other folks get to have a song of their own, the way I do. Well, I guess from now on you’ll have to look at me through smoked glass: don’t use the naked eye.
The writer Lee Smith is the only person I actually know who has come close to having her own song. Bruce Hornsby, of Bruce Hornsby and the Range, once called her up and said, “Hi, this is Bruce Hornsby.” She said, “Bruce who?” Later, she told me, “He was a big star, but I didn’t know it.” He said he was a fan of her novels, and he invited her to his concert. These days she’s a big Bruce Hornsby fan and belongs to his fan club. One of her novels inspired his song “The Road Not Taken.”
Now along comes Rick Trevino, ambling down the same little-used road. He’s a big country star, but I didn’t know it. His new album includes a song called “Bobbie Ann Mason.” I’m not sure he’s singing about me, but I won’t argue. Ditty immortality is mine. That’s me, no mistake. My name. On my birth certificate. Social Security card. The works. And I’m a real person, unlike Norma Jean Riley. Or Johnny B. Goode. Or sad Eleanor Rigby, who keeps her face in a jar by the door.
Of course, plenty of first names have been song titles: Alison, Elvira, Gloria, Layla, Maybellene. But those gals have no last names. They don’t even have middle names. They have a kind of broad-spectrum immortality. Too vague for Rick Trevino—he likes to be specific.
Actually, I’m reduced to a perfect nonplus. Rick Trevino is way too young to be singing about me back in high school, years ago. But that’s O.K. I’ll take it. How well he knows me! This song is a high-school-vindication dream, the wallflower’s revenge. Carrie returns! I was voted “most studious,” an accolade meaning “Homecoming queen? In your dreams, Mason!” My time has come.
Well, Bobbie knew her history. Bobbie knew her French.
Bobbie knew how to keep the boys in suspense.
She teased with a touch. She teased with a kiss.
I was three long years being teased by pretty Miss
Bobbie Ann Mason, back in high school.
She was way too cute, she was way too cool.
I hope Rick will play my song when he comes to Rupp Arena, here in Lexington, this spring. Rupp Arena is the home of the University of Kentucky Wildcats. At first, I had Rick Trevino mixed up with Rick Pitino, the Wildcats coach. Did Rick Trevino confuse me with somebody else? Maybe Rick doesn’t even know I’m real. Back in high school, I didn’t know he was real. He wasn’t born yet. Reluctantly, I checked into this. It turns out that Rick didn’t write the song. The guy who wrote it just liked the way my name sounded. He wrote the song for an old girlfriend whose name wouldn’t fit the melody, so he plugged in mine. Does this mean I wasn’t cute after all? To tell the truth, I didn’t know a soupçon of French.
The trouble with this song is that it’s so catchy it grabs that little gizmo in your brain that runs a tape loop. Or it does in mine, anyway. I’m being throttled by my own name, but at least I won’t ever forget it. It’s like an ad jingle, a singing logo, a talking T-shirt. Everybody should have a theme song. Hey, if you’ve got five syllables in your name, you can borrow my song! Hillary Clinton, take it for the weekend.
Of course, once you get your own song, your name is liable to enter the fuzzy realm of myth, like Stagger Lee or Jumpin’ Jack Flash or Louie Louie. But what I want to know is how did Dede Dinah feel when she first heard her song on the radio? And what did she do when she found out it was really written for Peggy Sue?
Terms of Office
Featured in the New Yorker, July 26, 1993
Q: Mr. President, in a recent news conference you used the rather colorful expression “He doesn’t know me from Adam’s off ox.” Senator Dole alleges there is no such term and says you employed this “pseudo-colloquialism” (he also called it a “Gergenism”) as a calculated attempt to sound “downhome” in order to woo back Southern Democrats who have deserted you. Would you care to comment, sir?
A: Yes, Brit, I’d be glad to clarify that allusion. In a team of oxen, the “off” one is the one farther away from the driver—that is, to the right. So if our ancestor Adam is far back in memory his off ox is even farther away—but maybe not as far right as Senator Dole. When I left Arkansas to attend Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, people back home would ask my mother where I was, and she would tell them I was off. Off at Oxford. I could have said he didn’t know me from Adam’s hatband, or Adam’s pet monkey, Adam’s brother, his brag dog, his chief communications officer—whatever. We use lots of these sayings in Arkansas, but you don’t know split beans from coffee about Arkansas, do you?
Q (follow-up): Sir, isn’t this another example of what your critics call Slick Willie waffling—claiming to be both an Oxonian and a good old boy?
A: Brit, let me say that “Adam’s off ox” is heard chiefly west of the Appalachians, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English. In the Northeast, there are only two lonely spots where the D.A.R.E. maps the usage of “Adam’s off ox”—one in upstate New York and one in Massachusetts.
We have a language gap. Let me point out that I wouldn’t naturally say, “He doesn’t know me from Adam’s off bull.” When I was coming up in Hope, we didn’t say “bull” in mixed company. We said “he-cow.” A bull was a gentleman cow, or a male cow, or a top cow. Up here inside the Beltway, you call a bull a bull, and you call bull “bull.” In the South, we have an expression for people who do that. We say, “He’s a person who says what he thinks.” And it’s not necessarily a compliment.
What you call “waffling” is just good manners back home. I was taught to say “he-cow.” And we didn’t say “rooster.” We said “chicken,” or “hechicken.” Schoolteachers would speak of “the he” and “the she” and “girl birds” and “boy
birds.” People never said “cock” in public. Any word with “cock” in it was taboo. They’d say “hoe handle.” Why, some Southerners still won’t say “the clap.” They say “the collapse.” Some old-timers back home still can’t bring themselves to say my brother’s name, Roger. “Roger” used to be a dirty word. A verb.
But yesterday’s gone. Now you can say “bullshit,” and it doesn’t even mean anything. Let me just say this: The trait of being inoffensive in mixed company is a major strength of this Presidency. You see, the whole world now is mixed company. It’s an advantage that the President of the United States is in the habit of spontaneously blurting out obscure regional metaphors that wouldn’t make ladies blush a century ago. I expect to do more of it.
Hey, I just got here and I’ve got a lot to learn. I know the Presidency is more than knitting cat fur into kitten britches. That reminds me—I could have said, earlier, “He doesn’t know me from Adam’s house cat.” And it might interest you to know that Adam’s house cat was called Nethergarment. A polite term for britches. Why, I know folks who won’t even say the word “socks.”
IX
Fiction and History
In 1988, I heard about a woman who had given birth to quintuplets in my hometown a century before and had become a worldwide sensation. Surprisingly, this had occurred just across the field from the house where I grew up. I don’t know why I had never heard the story before, but once I did, I knew it was mine. Within the afternoon I realized I was going to write a historical novel, a long one. I knew the basic situation, but I didn’t know the story. Who was this hapless family? What was it like to be a celebrity at the beginning of the twentieth century? It was necessary to imagine Christie Wheeler and her family and their community. I expected it would be a challenge to go back to the world of 1900, the turn of the century, which happened with all the hysteria and foreboding that accompany such milestones. But I soon realized that 1900 was hardly the past. As William Faulkner famously noted, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Indeed, the world of charlatans, miracle cures, lurid journalism, and celebrity culture flourished at the end of the nineteenth century, just as now. But also it was very much the world of my early childhood, when mules and horses worked the farm, when women cooked on a wood stove. My parents still spoke the language of that time, so I slid easily into the country talk of the Wheeler family in Feather Crowns. A pair of drawers might be “plumb full of holes” or someone might not have “the sense God gave a tomcat.” Talk like that doesn’t die out quickly.
—BAM
FROM Feather Crowns (1993)
CHAPTER 1
Christianna Wheeler, big as a washtub and confined to bed all winter with the heaviness of her unusual pregnancy, heard the midnight train whistling up from Memphis. James was out there somewhere. He would have to halt the horse and wait in the darkness for the hazy lights of the passenger cars to jerk past, before he could fly across the track and up the road toward town. He was riding his Uncle Wad’s saddle horse, Dark-Fire.
The train roared closer, until it was just beyond the bare tobacco patch. Its deafening clatter slammed along the track like a deadly twister. Christie felt her belly clench. She counted to eight. The pain released. The noise of the train faded. Then the whistle sounded again as the train slowed down near town, a mile away. The contractions were close together now. The creature inside her was arriving faster than she had expected. The first pain had been light, and it awakened her only slightly. She was so tired. She dreamed along, thinking it might be no more than the stir and rumble she had felt for months—or perhaps indigestion from the supper James’s Aunt Alma had brought her.
“You have to eat,” Alma had told her. “That baby’ll starve, though by the looks of you I reckon he could last a right smart while. You’ve got fat to spare.”
“I can’t eat butter beans,” Christie said. “They’re too big.”
Alma hooted. “The beans is too big? You keep on with them crazy idies and we’ll have to carry you off to the asylum.”
“Good,” said Christie, making a witch face.
In late December, when the doctor advised Christie to stay in bed, they talked about moving her back up to Alma’s house, where the women could take care of her more easily, but Christie wouldn’t go. She had had enough of that place—too many people under one roof. She said she didn’t want her children to be in their way. And she didn’t want to be waited on like James’s Uncle Boone, who wheezed and didn’t work. He believed he had TB.
She tried to turn, expecting the pain to come back, but her stomach felt calmer now. Dr. Foote probably wouldn’t want to come out this late, she thought, when the clock began to strike midnight.
Alma burst through the back door a few moments later. She hurried through the kitchen into the front room where Christie lay.
“Lands, here I am again.” Alma wore enormous shapeless shoes and a big bonnet with a tiny gray-leaf figure that resembled mold seen up close. A woman in a blue bonnet followed her into the room. “Hattie Hurt’s here,” Alma said. She grunted—her laugh. “It’s just like James to run off after the doctor when Hattie was right near. Why, Hattie can dress that baby.”
“Babies like to meddle with our sleep right off,” said Hattie cheerily. “They don’t want to come in the middle of the morning like civilized company.” She dropped her leather satchel on a chair and hurled off her coat all in one motion. Then she unbuckled the satchel. “Where’s Mrs. Willy?” she asked. “She always beats me to a birthing.”
“She went to Maple Grove to see her daughter and grandchillern and didn’t say when she’d be back,” Alma said.
“Mrs. Willy told me to take calomel when the pains commenced, but I didn’t,” Christie said.
“You’ll feel better when you get this baby out, Christie,” said Hattie soothingly.
“It’s not a baby.”
“She’s talking foolishness again,” said Alma.
Christie tried to sit up. She was in her front room, or Sunday room. The bed, directly across from the fireplace, was sheltered from the front door by the closed-in stairway to her right. To her left was the kitchen. The door was swung back all the way against the kitchen wall so that the two roofs joined into one. Christie leaned over to the bedside table for a rag, and Alma ran over to help her. Alma was rarely this attentive. Christie didn’t want to depend on her, but she was helpless. She had been helpless for weeks, and the condition had made her angry and addled. The children seemed scared of her lately.
“Alma, reach me a drop of water. My lips is parched.”
“You done flooded the bed,” Alma mumbled. She brought Christie a cup of water and a wet rag, then turned to the kitchen stove to tend the fire. “This water’s going to take awhile to boil,” Alma said.
“We’ve got time,” said Hattie, busy with her jars and tools. Her apron was freshly starched. It gleamed white as new teeth.
Christie’s belly was tight. It needed to loosen up. She tried to knead it, to make it pliable. She thought it might explode. She ran her hands around the expanse—the globe of the world, James had joked. She hadn’t needed a doctor for her other babies. It seemed that each time she had a baby her belly stretched and could accommodate a larger one. The second boy had been a pound heavier than the first, and then Nannie was so big she caused a sore that didn’t heal for weeks. But what Christie had in her now was more than twice as large as any of the others. She had a thing inside her that couldn’t be a baby—it was too wild and violent.
Hattie Hurt had visited several times during the winter, even though they hadn’t been able to give her anything more than a ham and some green beans Christie had put up in jars. Dr. Foote was sure to charge more money than they could pay, but James said he’d sell a hog.
“Let me take a look at what’s going on down there,” said Hattie. “Can you get them drawers off?”
Christie’s stomach was quiet now. She loosened her clothes and pushed down her step-ins, one of three
enormous pairs she had sewed this winter. James had joked about those too, but she thought he was trying to hide his concern.
Hattie Hurt had strong hands and a gentle, reassuring voice. Her voice reminded Christie of her grade-school teacher, Mrs. Wilkins. Christie still remembered the teacher leading a recitation of short a’s: march, parch, starch, harsh, marsh, charm, snarl, spark. She remembered how Mrs. Wilkins moved her jaws in a chewing motion to stress the sound.
Hattie poked around, feeling Christie’s abdomen. She examined the place between Christie’s legs. “You’re pooching out some,” she said. “Now just lay back and wait real easy. We don’t want to force it too soon.”
While Alma worked at the stove, the children still slept. Christie could see Clint and Jewell in the loft, above the kitchen, on a feather bed. She heard them stirring. Nannie was sleeping on a pallet in the corner between the fireplace and the kitchen wall. This winter, because of her pregnancy, Christie and James had shut off their north bedroom and slept close to the brick fireplace in the front room. Ordinarily, the children weren’t supposed to enter the front room except on Sundays, but this winter they had all moved in. The front room contained Christie’s best furniture, the almostnew cabbage-rose carpet, and her good Utopian dishes in an oak chinasafe. James had made their furniture when they started out together in Dundee. When they moved to Hopewell, they stored it in Christie’s parents’ stable in Dundee until their own house was ready. When the furniture finally arrived, it had some mouse stains, but Christie had never seen anything so lovely. She sanded it down and oiled it. Now her weight had broken two of the slats in the bed, and the corn-shuck mattress beneath the feather bed sagged through the hole in the slats. It almost reached the floor, until James put a hassock under the bed for support.
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