by Rick Bass
A JOURNEY
ELVIS WENT BACK down south and then over to Texas on a solo tour, and the Browns went on their Pacific Northwest tour with Jim and Mary. Ten years of Fabor, and ten years of touring, was beginning to take a toll on Jim and Mary. Had the Browns cared to see such a thing, they might have been able to peer into the short near future that awaited them, with the paths of nearly all mentors establishing as if through ancient negotiation the same trails down which their disciples must travel—but the Browns chose not to observe those diminishments, that underlying wobble, and instead, in the power and exhilaration of their youth, observed only the joy.
Sure, Jim was drinking a little more, and Mary seemed to be strung a little more tightly than even a year or two before, but there was still great fun to be had at every show, and in every mile traveled, in every breath taken in, and in every exhalation.
It was all so incredibly new—as if they had just been born. The air in the Colorado mountains was cooler and drier than they had known air could be, and they noticed that sounds traveled farther, and held together longer.
To save Fabor money, they camped out as they traveled, and built campfires to stay warm, and sang and played music far into the night, while Jim Ed and Jim drank from their flasks and watched the sparks cascade into the stars whenever they tossed wood onto the fire. Bonnie and Maxine weren't yet drinking much back then, but under those cold stars, and in the spirit of the party, they would have a warming sip now and again whenever Jim Ed or Jim passed the flask.
For a country music singer, Jim wasn't much of an outdoorsman, and the Browns sometimes teased him about this, calling him a rhinestone cowboy and telling him he would have to come visit them at their home someday, spend some time with them in the woods, before he could truly call himself country—but there on that trip, Jim began to learn a little about such things and was not displeased with a life he had previously viewed as uncouth.
The endless sky of Wyoming, and then, farther up into the mountains, the foreboding yet exhilarating forests of spruce and fir. The sulfurous exhalations of Yellowstone, the fantastic roiling belches of the mud pots, the hissing vent-hole aspirations of fumaroles. The impatient ninety-three-minute wait on the boardwalk for the spray of Old Faithful, with the brimstone taste of it in their lungs. Tourists rushing out afterward to reclaim their scattered laundry, having stuffed it down into the maw of the geyser some moments before the turbulent ejection.
Bears walking the roads and leaning up against their car with dagger-claws, nose-smearing against the glass, mugging for snacks. Jim trying to put some of Mary's lipstick on one bear, and the bear snarling and snapping at him, Jim pulling his hand back just in time, milliseconds away from the end of his guitar-picking.
Pelicans floating overhead, as ghostly white and slow moving as if in a dream, and seagulls drifting and squealing, no matter that they were still a thousand miles from any present-day ocean.
The tattered clouds of the Pacific Northwest, then—all the way to Puget Sound—where the slate and metallic sheen of the skies, bruise purple and storm green, was beautiful, but seemed to attach its leaden colors to Maxine's blood in a way that she found dispiriting. Too far from home, was all, perhaps, or maybe it just wasn't her place on earth.
In her home movies from that trip, she can see hints of what was to come, in those few frames that she inhabits, in the moments when Bonnie grabs the camera and turns it back on her. Not quite yet a worry or a fretfulness, but instead maybe just the beginnings of a kind of stillness or wariness: the dawning, perhaps, of an understanding of the nature if not the name of the thing—the blessing and the curse—that was in her. The realization that she probably wouldn't be able to slow it down or moderate it, even if she ever desired to. Which was just fine, more than fine, at the age of twenty-three. But not in control. Apace with it, but not in control of it.
Seeing those beautiful pewter skies in the Northwest and feeling the first tug or bump of depression: as surprising an emotion to her then as if a large ship far out at sea, floating serenely and confidently above a thousand feet of water and with no sign of a shore in any direction, was to suddenly bump hard against something just beneath the surface.
In the Pacific Northwest, she saw a killer whale. She was sitting by herself after their last show, out on a porch overlooking the water. She was lulled by the ghostly white shapes of the big sailboats in their moorings on the dark water, masts stark against the sky without their sails, the water lapping almost but not quite rhythmically against the dock. The male musicians were still inside the bar, drinking. Maxine kept turning and looking back in from the darkness at the yellow window squares, and at the mirthful, vibrant figures moving around within those frames. She wanted to join them but for some reason could not.
When the whale surfaced she saw only the back part of it, going back down, gleaming wet in the night. She thought at first that it was a sailboat turning slowly over. When she realized what it was, she ran inside to get the others—her sorrow or sadness jolted out of her, burned so clean and free, it was as if it would never return—but the whale did not reappear, and they teased her and accused her of being drunk.
Once they were turned away and headed back, Maxine quickly felt better, headed back downhill. The continent as vast as her dreams, and thrilling for that, but unsettling; it was as if the physical detachment from her home, one of those fractures that Fabor had counseled them about, had opened up, and everything she was, and everything she might be, was draining out.
They ran out of money in Idaho and Fabor wouldn't wire them any, so they had to wait tables and wash dishes in a truck stop, and play live shows in the parking lot each night, selling autographed black-and-white glossies of themselves afterward to raise enough money to get back home; but no matter, they were pointed in the right direction, and because of their youth, it was nothing but fun, only an adventure.
They were driving two cars, the Browns in one and Jim and Mary in another—they traded drivers and passengers—and Jim and Mary pulled a little homemade shell of a trailer that was stuffed with all their gear. Passing back through Colorado, they detoured to go see Pikes Peak, where, frustrated by how hard the trailer was to maneuver, Jim Reeves unhitched the trailer, took their luggage out, and gave the little trailer a shove with his boot, sent it catapulting over the edge of a thousand-foot cliff just for laughs.
At another point in the journey, still in Colorado, Jim and Mary's car ran out of gas in an autumn snowstorm in the middle of the night. Jim Ed hiked down off the mountain in his dress boots while the others stayed with the cars and struggled to build a wretched little fire with comic books and wet branches. They were on a back road, and no traffic passed by—they imagined they might remain stranded there on into the winter, and the next spring—but fortune favored them and Jim Ed found a cabin at the bottom of the mountain at daylight and got a ride back up to their cars with a can of precious gasoline. They continued on their way, back down toward the flatlands, back down toward warmth, back down toward home. Driving hard now, nonstop, with no more gigs scheduled, and the strange and intensely bittersweet pull of home aching in all of them.
They did not regret the tour, but each felt as if he or she had somehow gotten away with some great risk or gamble, in the adventure of their outing—had sought to pull away from the directive of where the larger world most wanted them to be and what it wanted them to be doing, and that although the freedom of that pulling away had been exhilarating, they were getting back home only just in time. What the consequences of not getting back home and reattaching might have been, they could not have said, but they knew instinctively that those consequences would not have been in their favor.
Almost as if each of them had been guilty, while on that grand trip, of spurning their various gifts, and were made uneasy by the strange thrill they felt in that betrayal, that willful destruction of the vague contract they each held. A contract that, unlike the one with Fabor, they had never signed, and neve
r requested.
They drove day and night, heading south and west, down out of the mountains and across the broad plains and then back up into the hills and hollows. They took the good roads straight on toward Memphis, arriving south of there just before dusk. They stopped and looked down at the Mississippi and were reassured by the force and mass of it, as well as by the deceptive leisureliness of its pace. The muddy color of the river, as well, was calming—prior to their trip out west, that color was the only one they had ever known a river to be—and with the last of the sun glinting off the water it looked like a winding path of bronze, passing with strength through a seething velvet jungle, and they relaxed further, watching it and considering the things they had seen.
Jim offered everyone a drink from his flask. There was a hand-carved sign in the pull-out area where they were parked that told the story of the New Madrid Fault, over which they were sitting. Back in 1811, the fault—which underlay the Mississippi River from Cairo, Illinois, down through Memphis and Tupelo and Jackson and all the way down to New Orleans and into the sea—had cracked like an eggshell. The Mississippi had run backwards for days in what everyone, slaves and slave owners and freemen, believed with deepest conviction was the end time, with the bodies of men and animals riding those frothy, muddy waves, pitching and tossing amid the timbers and rootwads of forests and the rooftops of houses. Horses, some dead and swollen from hundreds of miles ago, others still saddled and swimming hard, as if riding to war, but with no riders. A terrible harvest from what used to be downstream but was now upstream.
The Browns and Jim and Mary sat on the back bumpers of their old cars and watched the river until the glint went away. Then they got in their cars and continued on, following the river south for a while before stopping to call Floyd and Birdie. They gave them an estimate of when they'd be in, and proceeded on, a tiny caravan, winding now on the familiar country roads and back roads of their youth, drawing ever closer to the feast.
And when they passed the old sawmill, which was shut down again, and pulled into their dark yard and saw the lights on in all the rooms, saw the figures of their mother and father and Norma inside, saw those figures come out of the light and into the darkness to greet them, they were received as if home from a war. They introduced Jim and Mary to their family, and celebrated with music and Birdie's cooking all night long.
A fire in the fireplace, the smell of pies baking, and a pot roast cooking in the oven. Sweet potatoes, carrots, potatoes, turnip greens: home, warm and yellow lit and safe and intimate. Home, never leave, never leave. Bonnie laughing the loudest, glowing, exuberant and radiant. A glance by her over at Maxine, who, though smiling, seemed almost at one point to be wearing a stage smile, seemed somehow to be curiously distracted. Home, never leave.
LITTLE JIMMY DICKENS
BY 1956, THERE WAS no one bigger. They were as big as Elvis; Elvis was as big as the Browns. They had won every major award there was in country music, and the Browns had been at it just long enough that they were beginning to get comfortable with their good fortune. Ascent was all they had ever known; how could there ever be anything else?
Few if any mapmakers can mark the precise moment of highest fame or pleasure in any life, whether an ordinary one or extraordinary; and rarer still are the travelers' own abilities to do so. Maxine, with the alcoholic's force of denial—and no matter that she is in recovery—still believes her apogee has not been reached, that all which has come before has been but a false plateau. A more detailed observer, however, might suggest that the peak came very early, and quickly: on the first night they appeared on the Grand Ole Opry.
In typical Brown fashion, it was a night of their highest high, and yet one of the lows that would most gnaw at Maxine for the rest of her career.
They had been chosen to share the headlines that night with Little Jimmy Dickens, one of the original stars of the Grand Ole Opry. How they had adored him, had spent their childhoods crowded around the static of their one radio listening to him on Saturday nights, and counting the days and nights until the next week's performance.
Meeting Jimmy Dickens then, backstage, the first time they made it to the Opry. Approaching him with stars in their eyes—this little man, this icon—but being rebuffed by him even before they could shake his hand. Already, he had seen more change than he had bargained for in his life, and the high nasal whine that was his trademark must have seemed to him the antithesis of these three attractive young people, and their own sound, and their sudden fame.
He sneered at them, wouldn't shake their hands, and instead snarled the one most cutting greeting anyone could have designed— "Y'all ain't country" —then turned on his heel and walked off.
There was no one from whom such rebuke could have been more painful. They were too young, too heartbroken, too desperately professional to do anything but smile and pretend nothing had happened and move on to their next greeting. The curtains about to lift. The biggest night of their lives.
The curtains lifting, then, to the applause. Not a single face was distinguishable to them on the other side of that wall of light, but such radiant love emanated from that place. It was only two minutes and thirty seconds of love, to be sure, but it was love nonetheless, and something else, too—not just power and voice and control in a hard world, but some other beautiful thing that they could not quite reach or touch.
The sound pouring out of them and the audience roaring, rising to applaud their youth and originality. Giving them a welcome, an ovation, the likes of which Little Jimmy, in all his years of trailblazing, had never known.
Drinks backstage, afterward. Little Jimmy glowering, shunning them, leaving early. Able, in his fury, to see something that no one else yet could: that they were attempting to leave behind forever the place they had come from in a betrayal, a disowning, that was to him of biblical proportions. Harlots and blasphemers. He knew they were friends with Elvis, and though Elvis was not yet as huge as he would soon become, Little Jimmy knew all he needed to know about Elvis, too. Jimmy Dickens knew that once the Browns had crossed one line—leaving Poplar Creek behind, and leaving it so quickly, and making that strange sound—there were surely no other lines they would not also cross. The sound, once unleashed into the world, flowing downhill, spreading and pooling. Powerful, beautiful, treacherous, unmanageable. He didn't want anything to do with it, and he understood that it would destroy all that he was about.
DEER HUNT
JIM AND MARY CAME out to visit them that next November, after the northwestern tour, so that Jim and Jim Ed could go deer hunting. Jim had never held a gun before, and had been putting it off, but Jim Ed had been hounding him about it for years, and Jim saw it as a way not only to take a rest, but to reconnect with the Browns, whom Jim had not seen so much since Elvis had entered their lives, and to maybe even recapture some of the vitality that he remembered the Browns having when he had first met up with them.
Because Jim was family now, they brought him home to hang out and go hunting along the high bluffs of Poplar Creek, where the men sat in rickety stands up in the limbs of oak and hickory and ash trees and waited and watched for the deer that were the same color as the dried leaves. Jim Ed had hunted along the bluffs above Poplar Creek for all his life, as had Floyd, as had Floyd's father.
Jim Ed knew the places where the deer were likely to travel. It seemed mysterious, and from day to day, it was; but across the span of years, the movements of the deer compressed to a predictability that was surprising and yet reassuring. If you were willing to wait long enough, you would get a chance—as if the paths of the deer, over the long haul, were governed by decisions made by larger factors.
On their first hunt together, Jim Ed gave Jim his prize spot, the stand that overlooked the central corridor down which deer passed regularly. Jim had wanted to take his flask up on the stand with him—it was to be an afternoon hunt—but Jim Ed surprised him by saying that he didn't want to do that. Jim Ed had had uncles and cousins fall from their tree
stands while drinking and be killed or injured. "Plus, it's just better without," Jim Ed said. "It's great. You'll see."
"You're talking like some kind of prohibitionist," Jim told the younger man. A pause, and then a tease that was not entirely a tease. "Are you forbidding me to take my medicine up there with me, especially on such a cool autumn afternoon?"
"Hurry—we're late."
Jim eyed his flask. The forest dark and strange before them. "How do you know we're late?" he asked.
"I can just feel it," Jim Ed said. "It's going to be a good day. Come on." Jim shrugged, left the flask on the table untouched, picked up his gun, and went out into the autumn light with the younger man, and felt immediately how right Jim Ed had been.
They walked side by side down the clay road that sloped into the bottomlands, the sky blue and cold above them, with the brayings of Canada geese overhead. They talked about little things at first but then transitioned smoothly into the larger things that lay beneath them. The road left the field and went down into the forest, past the places where Floyd and the crews had felled individual trees over the years—past giant stumps in varying stages of decay—and into the area that Floyd, like his father before him, had kept reserved for hunting. The trees were immense, the mast crop plentiful. The quality of light was different, and the soil, closer to the creek, was richer from the many floods. Sounds were muted; there was a greater stillness among the big trees.
That first time, Jim Ed directed Jim to climb up into his favorite blind, a platform nailed to the fork of an oak tree thirty feet above the ground. Dry leaves blanketed the earth, with only a few red and brown and gold leaves still clinging to the branches above. If anyone had looked up at the fork in the tree, they would have been able to see Jim sitting up there—but the deer never looked up, keeping their eyes alert only for threats down at eye level, and the blind was high enough up that any currents of human scent were carried farther away.
