Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  As they got older, Gladys and Janette took on some of the workload, but Joe . . . well, Joe just made more work, especially after he got his legs under him. “I had a race with a train and throwed my clothes off,” he remembers seventy years after that race, from a living room looking down on the very same spot where the track once ran. “I was streaking. I laid down streaking in this country. That old engineer had ahold of that whistle”—here he stops and lets out the low, wet cry of the whistle—“I put the hammer down. I was getting it, and he just kept jerking on that whistle. I run it way up there about where you turned up to the crossing. Somebody come out of there and hollered at Mommy. Said, ‘Get over here. This young’un is running up and down this road bare nekkid.’ And Mommy she come through that bottom, and I seen her get a switch. I went under the house, and got up in there. She said, ‘You come outta there.’ I said, ‘No, I ain’t coming out.’ She said, ‘You’ll come out sooner or later. And when you do, you’re gonna get it.’ She sent Janette in there. Well, I just laid back there where them old chickens had worked that dirt into powder. And I waited until Janette got up there, and I started throwing dirt. I made thunderhead. She went a-hocking and spitting. It was in her nose and eyes and everywhere, crying. Then she sent Gladys in there, and I gave her a noseful of the same thing. And that just made Mommy even madder. So I stayed under there and it was getting dark. And there was rocks along there where they poured that porch. And I got the idea this was an ideal-looking place for a copperhead. And I eased out of there, went around the house, and went in that front room, got up in that bed and pulled the covers over me and got down just like a lizard. You wouldn’t hardly know I was in there. First thing I know, Mommy jerked those covers back and she had a switch. Hit me. I was nekkid. Had nothing to break that lick. I deserved that.”

  A.P. wasn’t entirely unmindful of the hardship his absences visited upon his wife. For a while he put his friend Brown Thomas on retainer to do some of the chores around the house. Brown was the brother-in-law to Sara’s great friend Dicey, and he was as odd as a seven-dollar bill. He lived just up the hill from the Carters, in a drafty cabin heated by fires he built in discarded tin drums. Brown did his farm chores in suit clothes, until they nearly fell off of him. He also told the wildest tales in the Valley and expected everybody to believe them. Sometimes he’d say of Sara, whom he insisted on calling Cary, “Cary give you a mattock and ask you to move Clinch Mountain.” Truth was, Brown didn’t do a lot for Sara. He could split wood and carry knotty pine down off the mountain to get a fire going. But he wasn’t good for much else. She didn’t want to leave him to baby-sit, for instance, and Brown could not be trusted to drive; modern mechanics overawed him. The first time Brown saw an airplane fly through the Valley, he exclaimed, “Thar’s something up thar in the elements.”

  But as luck would have it, A.P. found Sara somebody else who could help out: his cousin Coy Bays, just returned to the Valley from Kingsport. Coy was a mechanical whiz; he always kept a car running, even if it was just a tied-together heap of metal. A.P. asked his cousin if he would be willing to help out by driving Sara around when he was gone on his song-hunting expeditions. And Coy was happy to help, happy to have something to keep his mind off his own troubles. So it seemed like a blessing all the way around.

  * * *

  It was the hard luck that brought Coy Bays back to Poor Valley in the spring of 1931. He’d left the Valley fifteen years before, at age eleven, when his peripatetic father, A.P.’s uncle Charlie Bays, had moved his entire brood to Kingsport to make his fortune. Uncle Charlie started off with a little barbershop downtown, just two chairs, one for him and one for his oldest son, Dewey. But Charlie hated the trade, so he sold out and bought a sixty-acre farm from the Kingsport Improvement Association. Dewey stayed in town and kept at barbering, but the other children—Coy, Alma, Elva, Stanley, Charmie, and Stella—moved with their parents to the farm, and soon enough into a big story-and-a-half farmhouse with a sleeping loft. The house drove Coy’s mother crazy. Mary Bays swept and swept and swept and couldn’t keep the sand out. The farm was full of sand and gravel, but Charlie found a way to make even that pay. He had Coy and Stanley scoop load after load of sand into the back of the family pickup and haul it just across the river to sell to the Kingsport Glass Factory.

  Charlie made a great success of the farm, raising corn, hay, and hogs for market, and building a stock of fourteen prize dairy cattle. He even picked up a little extra cash letting his Rich Valley moonshiner friend land bootlegging planes at a makeshift airstrip on the farm. In 1925 he went in with Dewey—who now ran his own seven-seater barbershop downtown—on a big whitewashed Tudor-style colonial in Kingsport’s White City. The house had a seven-thousand-dollar price tag, but with Dewey’s income from the barbershop and Charlie’s from the farm, the payments were a cinch. The house had three stories (counting the attic room), four big bedrooms, papered walls, and hardwood floors throughout. In the basement was a coal furnace, and in the kitchen, an electric icebox. There was room enough for Mary’s new mahogany dining-room set and her player piano. The only downside was chemical fumes from the Eastman Kodak plant nearby, but Dewey figured it wasn’t any worse than the inside of his own shop, now that it was full of chemicals for the girls who wanted their waves and marcels just so.

  By 1927 Dewey’s shop had added all the services of a beauty parlor, and he was training his sister Charmie to handle the new clientele. He was making more money than ever, working harder than ever, and playing harder than ever, too. At just twenty-seven, Dewey Bays was something of a swain around downtown Kingsport. He was tall and lean, almost fragile, but he was suave. Dewey could talk a streak, quote near-epic poems from memory, and loved to tell women he was “part Injun,” that his great-grandfather Fiddlin’ Billy Bays was full of Cherokee blood. Dewey ran with the sort of crowd who honored the scent of halfbreed danger—a fast crowd. When the workday was done, he’d close up shop and race out with his hat tilted rakishly to one side, a flask at his hip. His ragtop roadster was always filled with young adventuresses in short skirts and long pearls, with marceled hair perfectly sculpted down over one cynical eye and a lit cigarette in hand. Dewey and his crowd spent their nights at speakeasies or nightclubs or, when it was warm enough, at the river, where nobody would bother them. A lot of nights Charlie and Mary would sit up at the kitchen table fretting over Dewey and his friends. A siren would start wailing somewhere, and they would be gripped by the vision of the ambulance drivers scraping their boy off the Kingsport pavement. They talked to each other about why Dewey wouldn’t settle down, make a home with a nice girl, but there wasn’t much they could do. Times had changed, and Charlie and Mary had raised city kids. Besides, they adored Dewey. He was so full of life, so much fun, so generous. How could they deny him his pleasures? He’d bought Mary the player piano, helped pay for Alma’s wedding, given Charmie her job at the shop, and now he wanted to pay for music lessons for his youngest sister, Stella.

  Still, they knew Dewey was not so dextrous that he kept himself out of trouble altogether. There were plenty of young men around who didn’t like Dewey getting too close to their girlfriends or their fiancées or their wives. And if Dewey ever did get in a fight, somebody might snap him in half. That’s why Coy set himself up as Dewey’s protector. Coy was big and rawboned. Barely twenty, he was six foot three, with outsize features he hadn’t fully grown into. He was never menacing, but the size of Coy Bays’s hands alone gave one pause, and the bulge beneath his coat suggested to any would-be assailant that Coy’s holster was not empty. Dewey always knew he could count on his younger brother; Coy worshiped Dewey. That’s why when Dewey started to get scared in 1927, he turned to Coy.

  First Dewey got sick, and he couldn’t shake it. This wasn’t just a day-after malaise but weeks and weeks of heaviness in his chest. When his legs swelled and he could barely walk, he knew he had to see a doctor. But Dewey didn’t want to frighten his parents, so he asked Coy to drive him over to a doctor
he knew in Virginia. The doctor saw it right away. Dewey had tuberculosis, and it was already advanced.

  Once Dewey was diagnosed, Mary started to worry for the entire family. When the county health clinic offered free TB tests, everybody got chest X rays. Then they waited. “We were peeling apples in the kitchen,” says Stella Bays. “And I remember the phone rang and my mom answered the phone. They told her that the results were back and that Charmie had TB, and Stanley, too. It was like writing out a death certificate. There was nothing they could do. They did give us hope about going to a sanitarium.”

  Stanley refused treatment, but Uncle Charlie made arrangements for Dewey and Charmie, who was just sixteen, to go to the Catawba Sanitarium in Salem, Virginia. Even with the state paying half the cost, payments were too high for Charlie to keep up. With Dewey out of work, Charlie knew he couldn’t make the medical payments and the house payments, too. So Charlie sold the big Tudor house in White City and moved the family back to the farm, where Coy watched his father turn into a bent, white-haired old man. Charlie sold off his prizewinning dairy cows one by one. And every day he worried over his firstborn son and his daughter Charmie—the most carefree of his children—who sounded so blue in her letters from the sanitarium.

  “Dear Dewey,” Charlie wrote in a letter just before Christmas of 1930. “You should be very careful and not overdo yourself. You shouldn’t be the least bit neglectful for it means a whole lot to get on good ground. I have not sent yours and Charmie’s board bill in yet. Times are so hard that I can’t ever hardly sell anything for the cash, although corn and hay and hogs is all scarce and will bring me in some money when I can find buyers. So I have got about five hundred dollars worth of corn, hay and hogs that will go a right smart way in taking care of you and Charmie at Catawba. . . . I am thinking of hauling my corn to Bristol. The mills is paying a hundred dollars per bushel. But they won’t be but a few bushels at a time. I will close. Will write again soon. From Daddy.”

  By the spring of 1931, Charlie Bays was out of cash, out of livestock, and out of plans—until Eck Carter stepped in. He told Charlie he’d buy all the materials for a house in Poor Valley, up in the clean mountain air. They could build it on the land Eck owned back behind his own house, way up on Clinch Mountain. They’d make a screened sleeping porch for Dewey and Charmie, where they could see the hillside Eck had planted with apple trees. It would be like their own private sanitarium, with family all around to wait on them. They could come home.

  So in June of 1931, Charlie and Mary Bays gave up their Kingsport dream for good and moved back where family and friends were already pitching in to build the house. The patients—Dewey, Stanley, and Charmie—all moved in. Alma was already married, so she stayed behind in Kingsport, and so did Elva, who had a good job at the Kress Department Store. But the youngest daughter, sixteen-year-old Stella, moved to the Valley to help nurse her ailing siblings. And Coy came back, too. He was twenty-six years old in 1931 and could have stayed and made his own life in Kingsport, where he’d grown up, but Coy was the only healthy young man left in the family. The way he saw it, it was his duty to move back to Clinch Mountain.

  * * *

  People from all over the Valley came to look in on Dewey and Charmie that summer. Bob and Mollie Carter came the most often. Dewey had never been religious, but he wanted Mollie there, praying for him. Bob and Mollie had always been close to Charlie and Mary, and tell the truth, they were happy to see them back. The four could always laugh together. One day sitting at the Bayses’ kitchen table, Bob said to Mollie, “If you could make apple butter like Mary’s, I’d eat it.”

  And Mollie said, “Bob, I brought the apple butter you’re eating.”

  For the kids, the best was when Eck came to the house. “When Ezra came to visit, it was just like sunshine. It was just like sunshine,” says Stella Bays. “He had this little wit about him. He was a joker, a teaser like Coy. And he loved a good time.” Every time Eck walked into that house, he brought something for somebody, but he didn’t like to be on the sick porch much, with Dewey. Eck had walked to school every day for years with Dewey, but he wasn’t comfortable watching his cousin die. So that summer he’d coax out Coy, Stanley, Stella, and even Charmie, and drive them to the river for a picnic and a swim, or he and Coy might spend a little time up on the mountain, at their still. They’d both been around, seen some of the world, and they understood each other. “Eck, if he didn’t like you, he didn’t like you. And my brother Coy was the same way,” says Stella. “If he didn’t like you, you knew. He could show it.”

  Toward the end of June—after returning from Louisville, where the Carters had recorded with Jimmie Rodgers, who was himself visibly wasted by tuberculosis—Sara started making regular visits up the mountain to look in on Dewey and Charmie, and Mary. “Sara would come from down in the Valley,” says Stella. “She’d take a near cut right up in front of her house there, and she’d climb the mountain. It was pretty steep. It would take a half hour to climb the mountain, but she always walked up there.” Sara never had much to say when she was visiting; Mary liked her quiet, strong presence. She could sit and listen to Mary talk for hours. Sara knew how to let her be sad, never expected false cheeriness, and never affected it. When Charlie and Mary asked, Sara loaned them $320.

  That was a hard summer for Mary, who was used to getting her way. But there was nothing she or anybody else could do for her Dewey. Sometimes they’d wheel him into the house through the big French doors so that he could have a bath near the fireplace, away from the breezes, but mostly he was on the porch with Charmie. Charmie was better, and even talked about her hope for a cure, “a lung operation.” At the sanitarium she’d got the idea that they could cut out her bad lung, and the disease with it. But out on the porch that summer, Charmie saw a preview of what the doctors said awaited her. By July, Dewey was nothing but skin and bones, barely able to walk out of the house. By August, he was too weak to walk at all and spent all his time in the bed on the porch. When Charmie was at the house, she’d stay in the room with the fireplace, unwilling to watch what was happening on the other side of the French doors. Charlie was too weary to deny the hard truth any longer. “I don’t believe we’re going to have Dewey with us very long,” he blurted out to Stella on a hot August morning. But even as he said it, Charlie bent to his task of milking a cow, unable to look at his daughter. One Sunday that month, for Charlie and Mary, Mount Vernon had its services on the porch, at Dewey’s bedside. “I remember Dad sang and asked Dewey if he was a Christian,” says Fland Bays’s son Vernon. “He asked Dewey if he had accepted Christ in his life. And Dewey said, ‘Yes.’ ”

  A few days later, early on the morning of August 20, Elva went out on the porch to look in on her brother and came back into the house, whispering, “Mama, I believe Dewey is dying.” When Mary went to the porch, Dewey asked for his aunt Mollie. When Mollie got there and began to pray for him, Dewey said to her what he could not bear to say to his own mother. “Aunt Mollie, I’m ready to go.” A few minutes later he was dead.

  While Mollie sat and prayed over Dewey’s body, Mary reeled out of her house and let out a wail that echoed through the Valley. Two days later, Mollie was at Mary’s side as they buried Dewey high on the hill, not far from Mollie’s own dead child, at Mount Vernon Cemetery.

  * * *

  In the last days of Dewey’s dying, and the first long months of mourning, there was a separate crisis secretly unfolding, one that would rip the Carter/Bays family right down the middle and tear at the bond Mollie and Mary had long sealed. But in the fall of 1931, the family had a powerful need to return to the quiet rhythms of daily life. So even if somebody did see another crisis coming, it was left unspoken—as if silence would render it harmless.

  Despite the sadness of Dewey’s passing, the event itself had cleared the way for a more normal life. The death siege had taken its toll on Charlie Bays and his family, and they had neither the wherewithal nor the energy to restart life in Kingsport. So
they just settled in among family. Coy and Stella, and even sick Stanley and Charmie, lent a buzz of electricity to the Valley. They’d put on their jodhpurs, lace up their riding boots, and go flying down the Valley Road on Harley-Davidson and Indian motorcycles. Or they’d pack a picnic, pile into Coy’s old canvas-top Hupmobile, and drive to the river for an all-day swim. When they did that, Eck and Maybelle would join them. “Maybelle was a big sport,” says Stella Bays. “She would do anything with the rest of us. She was young, a young mother. And Ezra, he was just as big a kid as the rest of us.”

  For a while, Eck and Maybelle’s house was the gathering place. Eck was gone on his mail train most of the time, and Maybelle still hated to be alone. Besides, she always needed help with the girls. Helen was four, and the new baby, June, was up and walking already. But it wasn’t just work. “That was the fun place,” remembers Stella, who was sixteen at the time. “Saturday, the young people from the Valley would meet there. Mr. Neal, of Neal’s Store, he had sisters; one was Vivian. And he had a nephew by the name of Beverly Neal, a young fellow about my age, and he was there a lot, the Larkey girls, my brothers Coy and Stanley.” There’d be music from the Victrola, and dancing, or games in the front yard. Maybelle would even let them play the old kissing game from her childhood across the mountain. “Some of those girls were very popular,” says Stella. “The Larkey girls were very popular with the Post Office game.