Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  But it was over too fast. The shows, the festival, even the visit to Poor Valley. Pretty soon, Coy and Sara had the trailer packed for the long drive back to California.

  * * *

  She’d been living as an exile from Poor Valley for nearly forty years. Even A.P.’s death in 1960 didn’t really change things. The only difference was Sara didn’t have to worry about hurting her ex-husband, so Coy didn’t have to stay behind in Bristol when she went to visit in Maces Springs. Coy liked it fine in the Valley; he had plenty of family, plenty of friends. But he was usually anxious to get on the road headed back to California. That was home to Coy.

  As far as anybody in California could tell, it was Sara’s home, too. She never really kicked; never complained. She bore her exile from Virginia like it was justice served, a sentence she deserved. She did like the simple life they led in Angel’s Camp, where Coy tended the fairgrounds. Coy and Sara had what they needed and no more. They had the trailer, which was just one bedroom, one bath, a kitchen, and a tiny eating area. But when they could, they’d eat outside on the campgrounds. Later Coy put a little addition on the outside of the trailer and that made a nice comfy living room, even if it did leak a bit where it hadn’t been properly sealed to the trailer itself. Sara could be in there most of the day. She’d smoke, read magazines, smoke, work on a bedspread or a tablecloth she was crocheting for one of the children, smoke, read a magazine, smoke, do a little housework, smoke. She still cooked the same simple foods she’d always made: corn bread and soup beans, biscuits and gravy, tomato gravy, ham, maybe fried mustard greens, or a green salad. Of course, her oil and vinegar was still mixed to its perfect proportion, always. And the corn bread, as her niece says, “was down to a gnat’s eyebrow.” She never invited anybody for a meal, but if somebody came to visit, she’d feed them. “Well, if you’ll stay, we’ll have a dirty little bite,” she’d tell them, as she got down the Guardian Cookware flat pans to go to work on corn bread and beans. When she was in the mood, Sara might do a song or two. “She’d sing ‘My Blue Eyes’ and she’d always grin at Coy and he’d grin at her,” says Gladys Greiner. Sometimes Sara would take visitors out and show them the peacocks she raised on the grounds. “They jump on my back sometimes,” she’d say. “Sometimes I have to hit ’em with a hoe.” But as she got older, Sara didn’t get outdoors much.

  When she and Coy had first moved to California, she was always up for outdoor adventure. “Sara was a good sport,” says Coy’s sister Stella. “When they went hunting, Sara would put on her hunting clothes and go with them. [Coy] always wanted her with him.”

  “She was a real good shot,” says Barbara Powell. “She used to go deer hunting with them all the time, until she shot the deer. And that was the end of that. She cried. I was at the house. And she sat there and she just cried. She said, ‘That big buck, those eyes just looking at me.’ So after that she never went hunting again.”

  Sara was funny that way. She could surprise people. She rarely wanted to listen to music, and never talked about it, but sometimes Barbara would be in the house while Sara was dusting the furniture or washing the dishes at the kitchen sink, and she’d hear her singing, quietly, to herself: “Carry me back, to ole Virginny, / Back to my Clinch Mountain home.”

  Sometimes if Coy was out on a motorcycle or up in the airplane Sara’s royalties had bought him, Barbara would watch Sara wear a path through that trailer. “Anytime he would go anyplace, she would worry,” Barbara says. “She’d pace and smoke and worry, pace and smoke and worry.” Sara’s husband gave her reason to worry. Once, when he was nearly seventy years old, Coy had spun out on a motorcycle and broken his leg. They had to put him in the back of a pickup truck and carry him to the hospital. “It was such a bad break, and because of his age it never healed,” says Barbara. “It like to worried her to death. She just went crazy. She was so upset.” Sara worried because Coy was a drinker, and a fearless one, too. Almost every family gathering, for years, somebody would say, “Coy’s in his back.” When she was little, Barbara thought her uncle had some kind of back problem. The real problem was he didn’t know when to quit drinking. “He drank. Sara worried. She smoked. Coy worried,” Barbara says. “They’d both promise to quit, and then Sara would go out and sneak a cigarette, and Coy would go out and sneak the bottle.”

  What scared Sara most was when Coy would get loaded and go up in the airplane. Sara finally sold it off, had somebody haul it away before Coy knew what happened. When he was sober, Coy was still the same attentive good-time Charlie he’d always been. For a while, he’d even wanted to perform onstage with Sara; he said he could do his imitation of a train whistle. But the first time he’d tried it in front of an audience, he opened his mouth . . . and not a single sound sallied forth. And Sara loved him and his pranks, even when she had to call the neighbors to apologize for his dropping toilet paper into their trees from his airplane. But as she got older, his drinking wore on her. There were times when she’d confide to a friend she wished she’d never married Coy: “That was the worst mistake I ever made.”

  But of all the regrets Sara silently bore, the biggest regret was the separation from her children. There were times when Joe lived in California, but he’d always go back home to Virginia. Her daughter Gladys and her husband, Milan, were perfectly content in the homeplace in Maces Springs, where Janette’s front door was a two-minute walk. Packages went back and forth from California to Clinch Mountain. Gladys would send clothes she’d made for her mother; Sara sent her crocheting. Janette would send a plaster shoe for decoration in the trailer; Sara would send Christmas packages with reel-to-reel tapes of greetings and stories for all the family. But those tapes were just another reminder of the physical separation. At Christmastime, when her children and their families gathered at Clinch Mountain, Sara was in California with Coy’s family.

  There was one Christmas, in 1959, when Gladys and Milan decided to drive their new car across the country to spend the holiday with Sara. They took Janette and her two youngest, Rita and Dale. The trip turned out to be something of a misery. For three thousand miles, Dale and Rita wrestled with carsickness and squabbled with each other. In California, the family crowded in with Coy and Sara, who listened to the children cry for snow, for Santa Claus, for home. But it was only after the short visit was over and the Virginia crew was headed back east that Sara sat in the emptiness of her trailer, alone, and cried for missing them.

  * * *

  By 1977 Janette’s musical program was a going concern. Joe had helped construct a big new building that seated hundreds, and fans were coming from all over the country for the festival. That year was the fiftieth anniversary of the Carter Family’s first recordings in Bristol, and Sara and Maybelle both made the show in gold-colored dresses. They were in Sara’s style, floor-length and high-necked, but Maybelle went along. The morning of the show, Sara was supposed to go to Theda’s early for her perm-and-color treatment, but she couldn’t get out of bed. When she finally made it, Theda had to help her up onto the short porch and into the house. Sara’s blood circulation was so bad, there were times when her legs went numb.

  When the festival was over and it came time for Sara to go home, Theda wondered if she’d ever see her friend again. Sara’s oldest granddaughter, Flo, was a mess the day Sara left for California. It should have been old hat: Sara and Flo’s leave-takings had been happening for forty years, since Sara said good-bye to her weeks-old granddaughter for that first trip to Del Rio, Texas. How many times had Flo stood in front of the homeplace while Sara came back for one last bit of “sugar” from her first grandchild? But this time, Theda saw, was different. Flo was crying so hard that Sara had to come back to console her. “Don’t cry, honey,” Sara said. “I’ll be back one way or another.”

  * * *

  The Valley had a way of drawing people back. In 1974 some of Eck’s nieces noticed he was spending time in Maces Springs again. Actually, it was a little odd to see him there. Eck Carter had got out of Poor Val
ley as fast as he could, and he hadn’t come back often. But that summer he was shuttling back and forth from Tennessee, and it looked like he was fixing up Bob and Mollie’s old cabin for comfortable living. Actually, he didn’t seem healthy. One of the nieces wondered if he was coming home for his final days.

  One day that summer, when Eck was home in Madison, Peggy Marsheck, president of the Carter Family Fan Club, dropped by for a game of chess. (He’d bought a collection of expensive chess sets on a whim, and it was his new favorite game.) They played for a while, and then Pop took Peggy outside to show off his garden. As he led her up a hill, Peggy noticed he was sweating badly, but it was hot, she noted, and he was wearing long pants and a long-sleeve shirt. Peggy was overheated, too, and Pop kept chattering about his tomatoes, and his future produce plans. But he looked unsteady, and Peggy finally asked him if he was okay.

  He took out his handkerchief, but instead of wiping his own brow, he handed it to her.

  “Why don’t we sit down for a minute?” she suggested.

  “I have more to show you,” he told her, but sat down anyway. He kept talking, and when he felt a bit better, he took her to a shed and showed her the new gristmill he’d installed. Before she left, Peggy made him promise to get some rest. That night, he had a heart attack. Maybelle had just come in from the road and got him quickly to Madison Hospital. He spent the next several months shuttling from a hospital bed set up at home to a bed at the hospital.

  “Maybelle felt she needed to be at his side every minute,” says Johnny Cash. “At the same time, we were very busy with concerts, and she was a part of them. . . . There was kind of a silent understanding that she’d come with us whenever she could. And she did.”

  Everyone hoped the work would help take Maybelle’s mind off Eck’s failing health, at least for a while. But she was always worried, talked about her husband all the time, and kept saying she had to get back to him. “The truth is, I never thought of them as being all that close,” says Cash. “They never really spent that much time together. But when he got sick, you saw how close they really were.”

  Eck’s heart didn’t get better, and then he had a stroke, which left him mute. He lingered for months, wasting away to one hundred pounds. After all Maybelle had endured with Kenny’s sudden death and Johnny’s drug addiction, Eck’s long, slow dying diminished her. By the time she saw his coffin into the ground, she was drawn and skeletal, her eyes bulging in their sockets.

  “She didn’t have the same energy,” says June. “We waited for it to come back, but we were afraid it might never.” Maybelle roused herself for one last record with her children and grandchildren, Country’s First Family, but she didn’t seem to enjoy playing much anymore. The final straw, according to June, came at a TV taping in which she fumbled a couple of notes and asked for a retake. “They told her no, that it was fine,” says June, “and that really upset her. To Mama, if it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t fine at all.” Only after her daughters raised a commotion was Maybelle allowed another take.

  A few weeks later, just before a show with Cash, Maybelle called her three daughters together and told them she was done; she couldn’t play anymore. Her stunned daughters left and shipped Johnny Cash in to reason with her. Sitting alone in the dressing room, she looked smaller than ever to her son-in-law.

  “Mother,” he said softly, “we got a show coming up, and if you’d just come out with us, the people would love you.”

  “John,” she said, “I can’t play anymore.”

  “But Mother, you don’t understand. They’re expecting you. They know you’ve got a problem.”

  She seemed surprised to hear it. “Do they?” she asked.

  “Well, I, uh, I don’t know,” Johnny stammered. “But people are saying that you may not have long to play. You know that.”

  Still, Maybelle wouldn’t budge. “I can’t go on that stage thinking I might embarrass myself or my girls or you.”

  And Johnny wouldn’t give up. “But, Mother, it don’t matter what you do when you go on that stage. They’re going to give you a standing ovation, just like they’ve been doing.”

  She was silent but trembling. “I cannot do it, John,” she said finally. “I cannot play anymore.”

  “After that, she pretty much gave up,” said Chet Atkins, who visited her shortly after her retirement. “She took me around the house and showed me all of her guitars. She said, ‘I’m going to give this one to Helen, and this one to June, and Anita will get this one.’ I said, ‘Maybelle, hell, you’re going to be around a long time; don’t talk like that.’ But she just said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ ”

  Mother Maybelle quit performing, but she didn’t quit living. In fact, she did finally have the retirement Pop had planned for her—thanks in no small part to Peggy Knight. Peggy was Maybelle’s constant companion. The women had met at the VFW bingo hall in 1968. Peggy had simply walked up and said, “Aren’t you Maybelle Carter?” and Maybelle invited the young woman to sit in with her and Minnie Snow. Pretty soon, Peggy was part of the family, though officially an employee. Having Peggy around had taken some pressure off Maybelle. She was a natural cook and could imitate perfectly all of Maybelle’s recipes—from dressed quail to stack cake. For a while, she and Maybelle even formed half of “the Rebel Housewives,” a game but not particularly fearsome team in one of Nashville’s weekday bowling leagues.

  After Eck died, Peggy would take Maybelle to the bungalow in New Port Richey. There was a bicycle there for Peggy, and she bought Maybelle a silver three-wheeler—it was basically an oversize tricycle—with an Indian’s head emblazoned on the front, and a basket on the back. Morning and evening, they would set off on their wheels, tracing the circuit Eck used to make, checking in on the friends they had shared there. People would see Maybelle coming on the trike, wearing her big floppy sun hat. She never got far before somebody stopped for a little chat. She’d dab her brow with her handkerchief and remark on the weather: “Isn’t it pretty?”

  She seemed more relaxed than anyone could remember, but she didn’t seem well. Even at the leisurely pace she chose, pedaling the tricycle was hard work for her. At the Obenreders’ house, Ruth’s husband would urge her to go inside and talk to Ruth while he pumped up the tires and fed the chain a little WD-40. And if, while chatting with a neighbor, Maybelle sniffed something savory coming from the kitchen, she would ask what it was, knowing the question alone would get her an invitation to a meal. At night, she and Peggy played canasta or watched television. When Johnny made a guest appearance on Columbo, she went over to a friend’s house to watch, but she could never take Johnny’s acting seriously. “She’d sit on the couch and have hysterics,” remembers Ruth Obenreder.

  What Maybelle loved best, though, was gambling. She and Peggy would visit a track in Tampa with the Littles and sit in the clubhouse, betting ten or twenty dollars, while people around them bet thousands. One day they shared a table with Pete Rose and another ballplayer, who laid out their money in stacks. Maybelle’s gambling did cause a little discomfort for June and Johnny when they had their friends Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth, to New Port Richey for a visit. June carefully hid all the cards she could find, fearing her preacher friend would disapprove. But when the subject came up, Graham urged June to “let them play.” His own father, Graham said, enjoyed a visit to the track as much as anyone.

  At home in Tennessee, Maybelle and Peggy played bingo almost every night, or they drove across the border to Arkansas, to the dog track. Whenever the Cash show played in Nevada, Maybelle went along for the ride. In Reno one night, Johnny saw Maybelle at the slots. And she was so animated, he thought, that she could do anything.

  “Whew, she loved to play the slot machines!” he says. “And I loved to stand next to her and play the one beside her, because she was a trip. She would run them coins through there in record time—exactly the way she drove. She was a slot-machine machine. And she seemed so energetic, I said to her, ‘These are your people here tonight
. How about going onstage with me?’ But she said, ‘John, I’m not going to do it.’ So I said, ‘Allll right, have a good night and enjoy yourself.’ ”

  Mother Maybelle did. Even when her health began to deteriorate, she grabbed her fun whenever she felt able. “When she started to get a bad back, I had to carry her back and forth from her room to the slot machines,” says Peggy. “One time, it was about two in the morning and she asked me to carry her back up [to her room]. I went back down again after I put her to bed, and an hour later, I was talking to this chicken farmer from Mississippi, and I look up and there’s Maybelle. She came back down on her own, and we played until six in the morning.”

  By the summer of 1978, her physical complaints began to multiply: There were thyroid problems, circulatory problems, bladder problems. By September, Maybelle had such a tangle of ailments it was difficult to diagnose exactly what was wrong, even for the esteemed doctors at the Mayo Clinic. Various rare syndromes were suggested, but the only thing doctors really agreed on was that she was not likely to live to the end of the year. Her daughters decided not to tell her.

  The afternoon of October 22, 1978, was Indian summer in Tennessee, perfect for a cookout. Maybelle asked Peggy to put some steaks out on the grill, and they spent a few hours putting up fruit. Then it was time for bingo. When Peggy suggested that perhaps they should skip it, Maybelle wouldn’t hear of it. She went, and she won. Other nights, she’d always been content to let her bingo winnings be brought to her, but that night, she told Peggy she wanted to walk up to the podium and collect her fifty dollars herself. She never even put the money in her purse, but carried it all the way home, crumpled in her fist.