Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  In a way, it was a secret; something they shared between themselves, apart from the rest of the world. Nobody else really got inside it, but Anita thought she understood it a little: “There was a feeling that flowed between them that the other one could do anything—could accomplish anything—they wanted to.” Somehow, Maybelle always figured, Eck would take care of himself.

  Every few weeks when he was in Florida, Eck would get a check from Maybelle. He’d take it straightaway to the Gulf State Bank, where Jo Korman would cash it for him. “It was his allowance, I guess,” says Korman. “I think it was about a hundred dollars.” That Eck could hold to an allowance was laughable to anybody who knew him. In New Port Richey, he’d already made friends with fellows who shared his passion for gadgets. He spent hours at the Kormans’ boat landing where Jo’s father-in-law, Ward, would show him the very latest electric fishing reel or a jazzy new camper or something else that made Pop drool. “It got to be like a competition,” says Jo. “They had to have the same toys. Pop would buy whatever and charge it all to Maybelle’s bill. And sometimes Maybelle got a little upset because he spent too much. She’d send down a note that would say, ‘I don’t know why he needs these things, it has to stop.’ And I’d say, ‘Pop, you gotta slow down. Maybelle’s gettin’ mad.’ But he’d say, ‘That’s all right! If she don’t pay for it, Junie will.’ ”

  “He loved to trade things, too,” says Eck’s friend Ann Zetner. “He’d try to trade stuff with my husband, Tommy. It would tickle Tommy ’til his eyes filled up with tears. It’s been more than thirty years now, but I’ve still got a little Evinrude engine that Pop traded towards a boat that Tommy had. And when Pop would get in money trouble he’d say, ‘Send it to Maybelle!’ or ‘Send it to June! Junie’ll take care of me. She can squeeze a nickel ’til the buffalo yells.’ ”

  “As far as I can remember,” says Korman, “it was always Maybelle who paid.”

  Home in Nashville wasn’t much different. Of course, tighter family finances didn’t seem to rein in Pop. Dixie came home one day to find him unwrapping a portable dishwasher. “May’s comin’ in,” Pop said excitedly, apparently thinking his wife would be pleased with the surprise he had in store. He hooked up the contraption and got it going, but it began making odd noises and something was clearly wrong. Just then, Maybelle drove up in her Cadillac. “She opened the door,” recalls Dixie, “and there was this dishwasher, jumping around at the end of a hose, with Pop just standing there, scratching his head and looking at it.”

  Maybelle stood silently for a moment, watching her husband.

  “Lord, Daddy. What have you gone and done now?”

  At least at home in Nashville, Eck had company. Sometimes more than he wanted, since they had a houseful living with them. They’d more or less adopted Dixie Deen, who wasn’t much younger than their own daughters. She’d grown up in the English countryside, fallen in love with country music, and moved to Nashville to be a songwriter. In the meantime, she worked at press and publicity connected to the music industry. Pop and Maybelle had taken to her instantly, and invited her to live with them at the house, maybe help out where help was needed. Despite the difference in their ages, she became Maybelle’s closest companion outside Minnie Snow.

  It was an unconventional household. Dixie stayed in a room at the end of the hall; across from her was a room reserved for Cash, whenever he might choose to appear. The next room down was Pop and Maybelle’s. “They had space for a bed and that was about all,” says Dixie. “That and some shelves, which Pop nailed to the wall and filled with dusty, musty books.” Most evenings, after cooking himself dinner, Dixie says, “Pop would get in his pajamas and spread out in the middle of the bed, wallowing like a big old whale, with all these books spread out around him, opened at different places. Maybelle would come in and she’d just stand there and say: ‘Lord, Daddy.’ That was her favorite expression.”

  On a typical evening, when Maybelle was free of work, she would pick up Minnie Snow (Minnie didn’t drive) and bring her to the house. Then Maybelle, Dixie, and Pop would put on their bathrobes. The four of them would then play canasta or a board game called Don’t Get Mad. These contests could be ferociously competitive. Maybelle loved to accuse Minnie of cheating, with mock seriousness. And Pop would get so wrought up, he was forced to invent his own swear word, which he repeated throughout the night whenever his luck turned bad: SHTUH!

  But a lot of those games would end suddenly when Johnny Cash arrived, sweating and pale, his eyes wide as flapjacks, knees trembling and arms jerking. “He would pace the floor higher than a kite,” remembers Dixie, “while Maybelle patiently tried to talk him into going to bed.” Eck just kept assuring the room that everything was going to be all right. “The Lord’s got his hand on Johnny Cash and nothing’s going to happen to him,” Pop would say. “The Lord’s got greater things for him to do.”

  * * *

  In those days, it wasn’t the Lord’s hand John R. Cash had to worry about, but his own. It looked like he was trying to kill himself. In 1965 he’d started to slide badly. His official address in those days was a one-bedroom hovel in the Fountain Bleu apartments on the outskirts of Nashville. In one of a series of bad decisions, he’d invited a young singer from Texas named Waylon Jennings to share the place. “I was on dope,” Waylon once told an interviewer about that time. “John and I were big dummies. We were going through a time when we felt uncommonly sorry for ourselves in the process of trying to get rid of one wife while trying to hang on to another woman, and neither one of them understood us.”

  There were painkillers, amphetamines, and barbiturates hidden throughout the apartment. For all the pills in the house, they could be surprisingly hard to find. Occasionally, June would come in and confiscate what she could; sometimes Johnny would simply forget where he’d hidden a cache. When he needed drugs and couldn’t find them, he’d stalk through the place like a caged animal. Once he tore the glove compartment out of Waylon’s new Cadillac. “There was a carpenter who we kept working a lot,” Waylon said. “Putting the hinges back on our door because we was always locking each other out. Kicking the door in.”

  During a performance at the Opry one night, Johnny decided it might be fun to smash all the footlights with his mike stand. “You don’t have to come back anymore,” the Opry manager told him on the way out the door. “We can’t use you.” Then Johnny talked June out of her car keys—against her better judgment—drove off alone, and wrapped her Cadillac around a utility pole. The car was totaled, and so was his face; he had a broken nose and four missing teeth. And he was afraid to call June to tell her.

  She always got the calls eventually: when he accidentally burned down 508 acres of national forest in California; when he got arrested crossing the Mexican border with 688 Dexedrine tablets and 475 Equanil concealed—badly—in a guitar. He spent the night in an El Paso jail cell, whence he was marched handcuffed and teary-eyed past snapping photographers. Not long after, a Ku Klux Klan offshoot published a leaflet claiming that his wife, Vivian, was “a Negress” (she had a dark Mediterranean complexion and a flat nose), which, to their way of thinking, made his children “mongrelized.” Cash hied himself to Maybelle’s house, probably looking for June, weeping with rage and despair. “My babies,” he sobbed. “They’re talking about my babies!” Of course his daughters were in California, and there wasn’t much comfort he could give them. Guilt about his lousy performance as a father (“I just wasn’t there,” he said in later years) drove him further than ever toward self-destruction. Meanwhile, the pill-induced paranoia made him think the Klan was after him. He armed himself with guns and tear-gas pencils, and began watching over his shoulder constantly.

  June’s daughter Rosie Nix recalls bumping into him in Maybelle’s darkened hallway one night while a police cruiser waited outside. He looked like a ghost, his eyes bulging, as he pressed his finger to his lips and begged her to stop screaming. “I was always sick,” says Cash, “and Maybelle was always tryin
g to take care of me. She saw me at my very worst and never pointed it out to me except to say loving things like ‘I hope you’ll take care of yourself because we really need you.’ She did everything with love, even coming into the bedroom at night to tuck me in. She’d shake her finger at me sometimes without a word, but always with a smile, as if to say, ‘You stay there, now!’ And she and Eck always had a big meal for me the next morning.”

  Even at Maybelle’s, Cash could not control his temper. If he got there late at night and found the house locked up, he’d kick in a door or pry off a window to get himself in. “He always fixed everything he tore up,” Maybelle once said. “You know when he’d come to the house, he’d come starved. I’d always see he got something to eat, and if his clothes needed washing, I’d see to that, because John did a lot for me. We had to stick by him. His people weren’t here. He was alone.”

  Cash tried to take the stress off his friends in 1966, when he bought a mansion in Hendersonville, Tennessee, just outside Nashville, and moved in by himself. Maybelle and June spent hours traipsing from room to room, looking for the stashes of pills they knew he’d hidden. Sometimes Rosie Nix would figure out what they were doing and join in. “It was like an Easter egg hunt,” says Rosie.

  Finally, in October of 1967, Cash was arrested for the seventh time, in Lafayette, Georgia. The local sheriff, Ralph Jones, not only released him but offered to give him back his drugs. “Go on, take ’em and get out of here. My wife and I have every record you’ve ever made, and it broke my heart when they brought you in here,” the sheriff told him. “You’ve got free will: Kill yourself or save your life.” Johnny went back to Nashville, drove a tractor into the lake by his home, then crawled into a cave, hoping to get lost and die. He didn’t get lost, and he didn’t die. And when he came out, he told June he wanted to kick. She summoned psychiatrist Nat Winston, then Tennessee’s commissioner of mental health, and John went off the pills, cold turkey.

  Maybelle, Pop, and June moved into the Hendersonville mansion, formed a circle around John Cash’s bed, and began to pray. When he fell asleep, they left him, but they never stopped praying or bringing him food that he wouldn’t eat and whispering comfort that he wouldn’t hear. For weeks, Cash had horrendous nightmares and unbearable stomach cramps. When he woke, he would tear his room apart looking for pills, then try to break open his locked bedroom door. It took about a month to go through withdrawal, but he made it. June and her parents had stuck it out with Johnny through the worst of times, and when he emerged from his addiction, she was ready to marry him. June and Rip had split up. Vivian had finally given Johnny a divorce.

  Just three months after beating his habit, Cash recorded a live album at Folsom Prison that is widely regarded as one of his finest. A few weeks later, he proposed to June, onstage in London, Ontario, in front of five thousand people. They were married in Franklin, Kentucky, on March 1, 1968. Of course, Pop and Maybelle were on hand for the huge reception that followed at Cash’s Hendersonville home. Eck, who had done all that was seemly to promote the match, beamed with triumph. It was hard to say exactly what Maybelle felt, but Anita interpreted the look on her face as “something like relief.”

  It might have been fatigue. Nearly seven years of vigilant, around-the-clock watch over Cash had taken its toll on Maybelle. Once, when it was all over, she confessed to one of the New Lost City Ramblers: “I don’t think I could do it again.”

  * * *

  At Eck’s urging, Maybelle started to spend more time at their bungalow in New Port Richey. The Florida Gulf weather didn’t necessarily agree with her, if for no other reason than it curled her hair something terrible. “As soon as she’d get there, Maybelle would start sweating because of the humidity,” remembers Cash, “and then she’d start complaining about the way it made her look.”

  But gradually, the place began to win her over. The fishing was glorious, and Maybelle, who had always loved to fish, now became a fanatic. There were freshwater catches in the Pithlachascotee River, which flowed just a few hundred feet in front of the house, and the Gulf of Mexico was just a short boat ride away. With a huge sun hat on her head, dark sunglasses, and a long-sleeve flannel shirt to protect her from sunburn, she would head out with Eck to the Littles’ fishing camp. She could fish for hours without growing bored, hauling in trout, redfish, and snook all day long. In the evening, she’d sit in a lounge chair and play cards with all comers. At certain times of the year, she loved to watch the “water fires”—effervescent reflections of moonlight. Some nights, a porpoise would jump, silvery in the light. In the end, she had to admit that buying a place in New Port Richey was not the worst brainstorm Pop had ever had. “When everybody else wanted to go in, Maybelle wanted to stay out on the Gulf,” says Cash. “Almost every day, she and Pop would have a big fish fry with potatoes.”

  She was popular with local ladies, who would buzz about Maybelle’s beautiful complexion. “I owe it to Pond’s,” she’d say.

  “She’d sit and tell how, in the old days, they used to drive around in an old model T,” says neighbor Ruth Obenreder. “They’d do afternoon performances and wear heavy makeup and take it off with Pond’s. Then they’d do evening performances and get their faces plastered again with heavy makeup. So she said, ‘We used Pond’s several times a day. Thank goodness, we could afford it; not everybody could.’ ”

  New Port Richey was also a great place for Maybelle to get to know her grandchildren, and to spoil them. In Florida, Eck and Maybelle did not deny themselves or anyone else small pleasures. The kids were allowed to sit in on Don’t Get Mad games, and often well past bedtime. Years later, the grandchildren would remember the leeway they got in that house: a warm drag from Maybelle’s cigarette, or a little nip from Eck’s wineglass. Even before they had licenses, the kids were allowed to drive one of Pop’s cars around the block, so long as they promised not to drive too fast or mention it to their parents. And they were all encouraged to play music. Maybelle taught them each her scratch, but the lessons ended there. She never liked to teach particular songs, even to her daughters: “You play it like you feel it,” she’d tell them. June’s oldest, Carlene, had a cover-girl beauty and a bell-like voice; her sister, Rosie, sang with power, more like Bessie Smith than any of the Carters. Anita’s daughter Lorrie had the same pure tones as her mother, and all of Helen’s sons could sing and play. But Helen’s Kenny was the prodigy. He played guitar and trumpet, sang beautifully, and loved to write songs. He wrote snatches of songs everywhere, on the back of his hand, on paper bags, even on his bedroom wall while he was laid up sick. By 1969, at sixteen, he was obviously headed for a life in music. Monument Records released his first single, a dark, Dylanesque antiwar protest song called “Is This the Way of the Free?”

  “Kenny was more like Maybelle than anyone I ever knew,” says Johnny Cash. “He was quiet and laid-back and very effective in what he did. When he did say something, it was worth hearing. At sixteen it was like he was twice as old. And Maybelle loved him more like a son than a grandson. She thought he hung the moon.”

  In February of that year, Maybelle, Helen, June, and Anita were in California to play a Johnny Cash show at the Oakland Coliseum; the promoter gave Cash a five-thousand-dollar bonus, in cash, for selling out the stadium. Then came the call, to Helen. Kenny had been hurt in a car accident; his injuries were life-threatening. “Helen was distraught,” remembers the promoter, Lou Robin. “I mean they all were, and they used the money to charter a plane to get her back to Nashville.” Kenny and four friends had climbed into a sports car built for two. When the car flew off the road, the driver suffered only light injuries, but none of his passengers survived. Kenny Jones died on March 8, 1969.

  Maybelle was destroyed. For the first time in her life, she simply collapsed. Her neighbors Les and Dot Leverett could scarcely believe what they saw at her house in suburban Nashville. Dot made a casserole and waited in the car while Les (who was the Opry’s official photographer and had known the Carter
s almost twenty years) walked up to the house to deliver it. He was met at the door by Sara, who had come from California to look after her cousin. Sara led Leverett to the living room where Maybelle lay on a sofa, staring silently up at the ceiling as tears poured from her eyes. “I got on my knees and loved her a little bit,” says Leverett, “but she was inconsolable.”

  Sara had little to say as she took care of Maybelle, and Maybelle said even less. If she ever articulated her grief, nobody heard it. She mourned until the weight of her sorrow was bearable, then she got on with her life as best she could.

  What else could she do? There was work to do. Johnny needed her. That spring he was preparing a weekly variety show for ABC television. Clean and sober, Johnny Cash was among the hottest entertainers in America. His Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison album went gold in a hurry, selling a quarter million copies every month. He was outselling the Beatles. The front room of Cash’s Hendersonville mansion was one of the most important creative centers in popular music. The Cashes began holding “guitar pulls” there. Singer-songwriters would sit together in a circle and try out new songs. “The most memorable night,” Cash recalls, “was when Kris Kristofferson sang ‘Me and Bobby McGee,’ Bob Dylan sang ‘Lay, Lady, Lay,’ Joni Mitchell sang ‘Both Sides Now,’ Graham Nash sang ‘Marrakesh Express,’ and Shel Silverstein sang ‘A Boy Named Sue’—all in the same night.” A few weeks later, Cash himself performed ‘A Boy Named Sue’ for the album Live at San Quentin, which also went gold.