“He’d never been so mad at me,” Anita said later. “I’d ruined his image. But he’d put us through—pardon the expression—hell.”
He didn’t stay mad at her long. Elvis, predictably, was sweet on Anita. In 1955 Presley was already running women through his hotel room and his dressing room nightly. And the Carters were always getting tangled up in his love life. Elvis was driving a baby-blue Cadillac at the time; the Carters traveled in Helen’s flashier red-and-white Caddy. But photographs and newsreels were mostly black-and-white in those days, so Elvis’s gaggles of female admirers could hardly have been blamed for mistaking Helen’s car for Presley’s. With keys, fingernails, lipstick, or whatever else they could get their hands on, “the girls would scratch their phone numbers on my car,” Helen laughed. “Elvis had it painted I don’t know how many times.” At the shows, crowds of girls would fight their way backstage, shoving one another out of the way in hopes of reaching the new pop god. “One time, this poor little girl got pushed clean back into our dressing room,” said Helen. “We said, ‘Now, honey, we’ll let you out this way so you can go to your car.’ ” She said, “I can’t! My mama’s out there trying to kiss him!”
In the middle of it all, though, Elvis and Anita embarked on an extended flirtation. Presley’s bodyguard Red West later wrote that Anita made Elvis act like “a kid with six pair of feet.” Anita was already married to Don Davis, but Elvis was undeterred. He went to great lengths to get her attention, and she went to equally great lengths to show her indifference. One day, the two were in Elvis’s Cadillac, driving through the streets of Nashville, when Anita started yelling at him. “It’s Audie Murphy! Pull over, Elvis. It’s Audie Murphy!”
“Well,” said Elvis, “at least now I know what gets you excited.”
When he used a “bad word” in Mother Maybelle’s car (Maybelle was not present), Anita stopped the car and made him get out and hoof it. He retaliated after a packed concert at the Gator Bowl in February of 1956. The Carters had pulled their car close to the stage, and when Elvis finished his set, he headed right for them. Climbing into the car, he dropped limply into Anita’s lap. He was out cold. He had been a little under the weather before he went on; his breathing was shallow. “I’d never seen a man do that before, so I started crying,” Anita said. “In fact, I started screaming, ‘He’s going to die on me!’ ” A moment later, Colonel Parker turned up and tried to pull Elvis out of the car to sign autographs. When Anita screamed at him to stop, the colonel realized his meal ticket was in serious danger. A path was cleared and the car headed for a hospital, where Maybelle signed him in and took responsibility for the bill. The Carters went home that night worried sick. They had arranged to go deep-sea fishing with Presley the next day, but had no heart for it now and canceled the boat. The next morning Elvis walked into their hotel looking fit as could be. “We about killed him,” Anita said. The whole thing, he later told West, had been an act to get Anita’s attention.
The time finally came, of course, when Elvis wanted to talk seriously about their relationship. “If I married you,” Elvis told her, “I’d feel comfortable, because I know you’d love me just as much if I still drove a truck.” Anita, however, was not the type to have an affair, and she could not imagine herself as Mrs. Elvis.
“The thing is,” he said, “I don’t know anybody else like you and your sisters. Would you look for someone for me that’s like you all?”
Anita shook her head. “I can’t be the one to find someone for you.”
“Well,” he said with a sigh, “I guess I’m going to have to find one on my own and raise her to suit myself.” Anita would often think of this years later, when she read about Elvis’s relationship with his wife, Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he started “raising up” almost as soon as he met her, at the age of fourteen.
After he left for Hollywood in 1956, Anita and the rest of the family rarely saw Elvis. By then, though, Presley had helped usher in the age of rock and roll, an era in which the Carters’ music would be subsumed. Sam Phillips’s boys—Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash—were raised on gospel and country music. Prompted by the question “Y’all know ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’?” the four had once sat in the Sun Records studio running through their favorite hymns. But their hit songs were the yearnings of the flesh. In fact, by the mid-fifties, everybody seemed to be singing about scratching the big itch, and Maybelle’s more indirect and innocent songs of woodland cottages and myrtle, dewy roses and heavenly light, were starting to feel a little dusty.
The girls were splitting off again, too. Anita joined a pop ensemble with Rita Robbins and Ruby Wells (daughter of Kitty Wells) called Nita, Rita, and Ruby. By 1957 they were recording songs such as “You Came to the Prom Alone” for RCA. A solo record for Cadence, “Blue Doll,” won Anita an appearance on American Bandstand, but nothing much came of it. Before the end of the fifties, she and Don Davis left Nashville for the quieter shores of Mobile, Alabama.
June had decided to accept an offer from famed director Elia Kazan to study acting in New York. With her short marriage to Carl Smith more or less over and her finely tuned showbiz antenna telling her that country music was on the outs, she could hardly say no. Still, she did not leave the Opry altogether; she had a daughter now, Rebecca Carlene (named for Bowman and Smith), and was determined to maintain her independence and her income. She flew back and forth between New York and Nashville, writing commercials for Pet Milk, Kellogg’s Cornflakes, and other Opry sponsors. Life in New York was a revelation. She became close friends with Robert Duvall (many years later, he would cast her as his mother in his acclaimed film The Apostle) and even dated James Dean. She appeared on television shows such as The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show, Gunsmoke, and The Adventures of Jim Bowie; she cohosted The Mike Douglas Show.
Maybelle rooted for her daughters, even while her own career ebbed. She continued to work the Opry, but the Ryman crowd was more interested in the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie,” and Marty Robbins’s “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation).” Maybelle began to take whatever dates came her way. With Helen or Anita (Becky was now married and gone) and whoever else was available, she went on the road with the Duke of Paducah’s traveling show. The Duke’s program was the very antithesis of late-fifties cool. He was the ultimate hayseed and reveled in it. He would begin each show with his signature line: “These shoes are killin’ me!” He would end each show with another tagline: “I’m goin’ back to the wagon, boys. These shoes are killin’ me!” In between, he would tell dozens of worn-out vaudeville groaners. (He is said to have sold his file of some four hundred thousand jokes to the producers of Hee Haw.) As audiences dwindled, the show pathetically began billing itself as a Rock-and-Roll Revue.
For the first time in Maybelle’s career, touring was starting to feel like a chore. She’d always been content to be a small player in the big show, but now the show itself felt small. Even a trip to the Waffle House, once her favorite restaurant, brought Maybelle little cheer. Her income was falling. None of the Nashville companies wanted her to record, and royalties for the Original Carter Family songs had dried up completely. After more than thirty years in the music business, and nearing age fifty, Maybelle Carter found herself wondering if there was still a place for her.
Pleasant Carter, 1959 (Carter Family Museum)
A.P. Carter Grocery (Carter Family Museum)
Pleasant on the Porch
Janette caught him at it a few times, his game with the chicken. There would be her daddy on the porch, just sitting, waiting . . . waiting for the chicken to come to him. He had a little method worked up: In his hand he held a string, which trembled along the length of it, to where it was fastened to the open door of a wire cage. He’d made a path of cornmeal from the yard to the porch and up the stairs, along the porch floor and right into the deepest corner of that cage. And when a chicken ate its way into that corner, Pleasant Carter was going to yank that string, and the door would sl
am shut, whap! Supper. Anybody else would just walk off the porch and grab a yard runner, the way Mollie Carter used to sail right out her front door, grab the first one she saw, break its neck with one quick swing, and have it plucked and cleaned inside ten minutes. Now, in the late fifties, on the cusp of the space age, anybody from the Valley could drive over to the grocery store in Gate City and a buy a fryer.
But A.P. Carter had a lot of time on his hands, so he could sit for hours, alone and daydreaming, waiting for his chicken. What made the enterprise doubly strange was how any other time you couldn’t have made him sit still at gunpoint. But when he got a notion to do something—even if it required stillness—he still liked to give it a try, just to see if it could be done. Once when he was lying in wait, his three-year-old granddaughter came crashing out through the screen door, scaring away his prey. “I ought to turn you over my knee and spank you,” he said, and the little girl saw a hard glint in his eyes. His anger passed, however, giving gave way to a simple resignation that he’d have to start over.
Pleasant Carter was an old man by then, with a farmer’s coloring: dark in the face, neck, and hands, white as Gold Medal Flour everywhere else. There was a pinch of sadness at the corners of his watery blue eyes, and still the constant tremor in his hands, which hung palms back, passively, off his long arms. Pleasant had a thatch of gray hair, long on top and tousled, but close-cropped at the sides, just like he wore it back in the thirties. He didn’t like to fuss over it much. A friend drove him to Weber City once to get him barbered. Pleasant sat hunched over and stock-still, grinning at the warm whir of clippers on the back of his neck, like a five-year-old in the chair for the first time, until he caught sight of the barber in the mirror, reaching for a bottle of hair tonic. Then he nearly jerked himself out of that chair.
“What’s that?” A.P. demanded.
“Don’t you want a little Vitalis?” the barber asked. “Top it off?”
There was a pause and then, loud enough for everyone in the shop to hear, A.P. boomed, “I’d just as soon have a stud horse leak all over my head.”
The barber never even got the Vitalis opened. Stubborn, that was Pleasant Carter, still. “That Doc,” people said, “you can’t change his mind.” And by now, A.P. Carter was well set in his ways.
Take his clothes, for instance. At first glance they were nothing special, straight out of the “Monkey Ward” catalog or Sears: cotton long-sleeve shirt with a soft collar, a tie that hadn’t been in fashion since before World War II, and gray wool trousers held up by suspenders. Look closer and anybody could see the suspenders were busted at the hasp. But Pleasant was fond of them, and didn’t like to throw away comfortable things, so he salvaged them with a three-inch flathead nail that fastened through a belt loop of his pants. It’s one of the few things his youngest grandson would remember about him. “You had to be careful when you sat on Papaw’s lap,” says Dale Jett.
Like as not, Pleasant had slept in those same clothes the night before, simply kicked off his brogans, pulled out the nail, and flopped down on one of the double beds he kept in the little room above his general store. He’d get up before dawn, slip on his shoes, and head out of the store and along the railroad tracks to the old homeplace, the house he’d bought for Sara. His daughter Gladys lived there still, with her husband, Milan. Gladys would get A.P. breakfast, just like she had for the last quarter century. Gladys was an early riser, up and working before the sun—except on Sunday. Gladys liked to sleep in, Sundays. On Sundays, the old man would wear a path through the house, circling through the front room, stopping at ever-shortening intervals in front of the iron stove to give it a good, loud wake-up bang, until Gladys finally emerged from her bed to cook his eggs.
Or maybe he’d walk the hundred feet up Clinch Mountain to Janette’s new house. Pleasant had built her the house after she broke up with Jimmy Jett and moved back from Bristol with two toddlers, Rita and Dale. Janette would get him breakfast, too, but she might also fuss at him to change his socks. So maybe he’d just walk back and forth along the tracks, deciding where to eat breakfast. Walking there in the earliest light of day, A.P. must have felt a special kinship with that old pair of iron runners disappearing off into the distance. They were more or less contemporaries, A.P. and those railroad tracks, having entered the Valley about the same time. He first knew the railroad as the deliverer of the outside world, daily dropping its loot at Poor Valley’s front doorstep, which was Neal’s Store. Only later came the dawning that those tracks didn’t just lead in, they led out.
When he was growing up, and later as he was raising his own children, two or three passenger trains a day came roaring down those tracks. Of course, there were also the freights. Back in the day, a double-stack freight train would clang down off Duggan Hill, hitting the crossing in front of Neal’s around first light, whistling awake the five hundred citizens of the Valley, and then, moving like time itself, without stopping, would continue toward its appointed destiny. Every morning, it left behind a plume of smoke black against the dawn, the conjoined aroma of burning coal and oil, and a chorus of roars and metallic screeches, all of which dissolved slowly, but so surely, and so finally, that the entire passing might have been an apparition. What remained, always, were the tracks, still leading away. While the tracks themselves could never reveal much about the world outside the Valley, they had once fevered Pleasant’s boyhood dreams of what that world might be like, and encouraged the notion that he might have a place in it.
Looking back over his life, A.P. Carter could say he’d made it out, and that he’d made his place, but somehow his journey felt incomplete and, in its lack of defining finality, like another apparition dissolved. For like this broke-down railroad, pushed aside by interstate highways and cargo jets, A.P. Carter had been mostly forgotten.
Neighbors might see him walking back and forth alone, all six-foot-two of him, bent slightly forward as if walking into the wind, his hands still folded behind his back, his long legs still loping down the tracks. He wore a sly little grin, which was as steadfast and comfortable as the rest of his wardrobe. It was as though he was living in the line from one of his long-ago songs: Do not disturb my waking dream.
But nobody in the Valley knew precisely what all went on in that mind. Not that A.P. was another Poss Harris. Poss walked around with a little smile on his face all the time . . . never said a word. Somebody in Maces Springs would walk into his house and find Poss sitting in the living room, smiling, come for a visit. He’d not say a thing, just sit a while, then get up and leave. Poss could be a bit unnerving. But Pleasant, he just liked to live in his own head, and he’d long ago learned to keep his waking dreams to himself. So he was forever mumbling to himself, or humming, and then all of a sudden he’d sing out some lyric he’d worked up. Or maybe he’d start chuckling at some private joke. When he really got laughing, his shoulders bounced up and down, and it sounded like he might be choking. People around him might get caught up in the laughter, too, even though they had no idea what he was laughing at.
Maybe he was laughing about something that had happened just a few hours ago. Or maybe he was laughing about something that happened years back and once again had struck him funny. The story of the two Tom Carters always got him going. There was Big Tom Carter, the preacher who lived across the Knob in the Little Valley, along Highway 58, and Little Tom Carter, a farmer who had land a little farther down the highway. One night, Little Tom’s wife called an ambulance for her ailing husband, and it came out of Holston Valley Hospital, wailing down 58. When the driver saw a mailbox that said Tom Carter, he pulled up along the wrong Tom’s house. Well, Big Tom had been feeling poorly, and what did he know about these new doctors anyway, or how they monitored a body? Big Tom figured they must know something he didn’t. So he laid down on the gurney and let them carry him into the ambulance (all six and a half feet and 320 pounds of him) and off they went to the hospital. By then, Little Tom’s wife was in a state, because her husband couldn’t cat
ch his breath at all and she had to call the emergency number again, and the ambulance driver and his partner came roaring back down 58, praying to their maker that this Tom Carter was not proportioned like the first.
Doc would also chuckle about the time one old farmer passed and his neighbors did what they always do in the Valley: They dug him a grave next to the wife. Problem was, the old man had had a busy life, and three wives, so by that afternoon there were three freshly dug graves and only one body. Or Pleasant might take off giggling about himself. There were plenty of stories. Pleasant and the cat. Pleasant and the mule. Pleasant and the Knoxville diner. Pleasant and the sawmill. Pleasant and the other mule. Pleasant and the other sawmill. There was a long list. In fact, from the tracks he could see a few of his follies: the too-small garage he’d made for Mr. Peer two decades before, a fair tobacco barn now; the long-unused sawmill boiler he and Milan had crowbarred off a truck—it landed on its side and they never did get it up and working. At least Milan had taken down the front gate for the fence A.P. never completed at the homeplace.
A.P. had built his store after the same fashion, not long after Sara left the music business for her new life in California. He’d started building it after the Second World War, across the road from Gladys’s, on a two-acre parcel of land he owned north of the railroad. After he sank the posts and put in a subfloor, he framed out a door. For a long time, all that stood on the lot was a subfloor, and a front door in want of walls. Well, that was Doc for you. That’s what his friends would say. Even after he got the walls up—along with a stylish double-peaked roof and a little porch—he didn’t go about the business in an altogether businesslike fashion. In fact, he ran it to the beat of his own idiosyncratic rhythms. The store never really had regular hours, but opened when he felt like it. Pleasant might keep it shuttered all through the winter. Even in the height of summer, he never did a brisk trade in anything but soda pop, which he sold out of a big Coca-Cola cooler.
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? Page 35
