Heart Songs and Other Stories

by Annie Proulx

  The house was old and broken, the splintery grey clapboards hanging loosely on the post-and-beam frame, the wavery glass in the windows mended with tape and cardboard. A hand-painted sign over the door said GOD FORGIVES. He could see a child’s face in the window, see fleering mouth and squinting eyes before it turned away. Arook, arook, came a ferocious baying and barking from the dogs chained to narrow lean-tos beside the house. They stood straining at the edges of their dirt circles and clamored at his strangeness. Snipe stood on the broken millstone that served as a doorstep. Threads of corn silk lay on the granite. He was let into the stifling kitchen by the child whose uncontrolled face he had seen.

  The stamped tin ceiling was stained dark with smoke, a big table pushed against the wall to make more room. Above it hung a fly-specked calendar showing a moose fighting off wolves under a full moon. The Twilights sat silently on kitchen chairs arranged in a horseshoe row with old Eno at the center. Their instruments rested on their knees, their eyes gleamed with the last oily shafts of August sunlight. No one spoke. The old man pointed with his fiddle bow to an empty chair with chromium legs and a ripped plastic seat off to the side. Snipe sat in it and took his guitar out of its case.

  Eno Twilight’s thick yellow-white hair was matted and clumped like grass in a November field, his face set in deep, mean lines. His fiddle was black with age and powdered like a sugar cake with rosin dust. He pointed his bow suddenly at the overalled farmer who sat wheezing an accordion in and out, its suspirations like the labored breathing of someone dying. “Give me a A, Ruby.” The major chord welled out of the accordion and the old man twisted his fine-tuning screws delicately. Without a word or signal that Snipe could see, they began to play. It was new to Snipe, but a simple enough progression to follow. He slid in a little blues run that got him a cold look from old Eno.

  “Just a piece of wedding cake beneath my pillow …” sang the girl in a hard, sad voice. The sun was gone and the room filled with dusk. The girl was fat, richly, rolling fat, and dressed in black. Her face was beautiful, with broad, high cheekbones and glittering black eyes. Genghis Khan would have loved her, thought Snipe, loving her himself for the bleakness of her voice. Ruby would be her brother, with the same broad face and heavy body. His accordion made a nasal, droning undernote like bagpipes, broken every few bars by circus music phrases, flaring, brassy elephant sounds. The effect was curious but not disagreeable. It gave the music a sardonic, rollicking air, like Long John Silver dancing a hornpipe, his wooden leg dotting blood on the captured deck.

  Snipe introduced himself after the song ended and gave them a broad, glad-hand smile like a proof of good intent. They didn’t care who he was, barely looked at him, and he darkened with embarrassment. Again, without warning, they began to play. “Rules was made to he broken.” sang fat Nell, and old Eno laid his cruel face onto the fiddle and set a line of cloying harmony against her pure voice.

  After a few songs Snipe was excited. They were good. Old Eno played with extraordinary virtuosity, complicated rhythms and difficult bowings, his left hand moving fluidly up and down the fingerboard instead of locking into first position as many backcountry players did. Shirletta. his wife, thin as a wire, grey hair in grey plastic curlers, twitched her little mouth and rang her mandolin like u dinner bell.

  The songs rolled out, one after another, with only a few seconds between each one. Snipe didn’t know any of them. “What’s that called?” he would ask at the end of a tune, and the Twilights would stare at him. Someone would mumble. “The Trout’s Farewell,” or “Wet Hay,” or “There’s a Little Gravestone in the Orchard,” or “Barn Fire,” the last a ramping, roaring jig with harmonic yodeling by all the Twilights at such speed that Snipe could only hang on and clang the same chord for six full minutes. “Why haven’t I heard that one before?” he cried. “Who does it?” No one answered him.

  At nine the old man looked over and said, “Well, it’s time,” and the Twilights obediently laid their instruments aside. Snipe’s fingers throbbed from hours of playing without a break. The hot kitchen had made him thirsty, but Eno said, “Good night. Next Wednesday same time if you want to come. You ain’t too bad, but we don’t go in for that fancy stuff.” Snipe knew he meant the blues run.

  “Listen, where do you play?” asked Snipe.

  “Right here,” said the old fiddler, giving him a look as hard as knots in applewood.

  “No, I mean, where do you play dances, play out, whatever. Gigs, you know?”

  “We don’t play out.”

  “You don’t play anywhere but here? Nowhere else?”

  “Nowhere else. We make a joyful noise unto the Lord.” He turned away toward an inner doorway where fat Nell stood in the dim light. Snipe thought he had heard mockery in the old man’s voice.

  He would have skipped down the dark track lit by the bobbing circle of his flashlight, but he was afraid of breaking his legs. He felt charged with energy. These were real backwoods rednecks and he was playing with them. They were as down and dirty as you could get, he thought. Before he backed down the hill in the darkness, he held the flashlight in his teeth and scribbled all the songs he could remember on the back of Eno’s letter: “The Road Accident,” “Trumpled in a Fight,” “Silver Hooves.” Good, authentic rural songs. The real stuff. Where had the Twilights heard them? Seventy-year-old records as thick as pies? Old Eno’s childhood radio memories? Local dances? The car cracked over the stones in the night. Snipe sang, “JUST A PIECE OF WEDDING CAKE BENEATH MY PILLOW,” in a slow, honking voice. His headlights shone in the green eyes of cats in the ditches as he drove back to his rented house.

  The house was on a lake, and as he coasted down the drive, lined with its famous sixty-year-old blue Atlas cedars, he could see light from the living room window falling on the water like spilled oil. The car ticked hotly as he stood in the darkness. Under the slap of the waves against the dock he caught the monotonous pitch of mechanical television voices, and went inside.

  Catherine sat in the tan recliner. Her eyes were closed and the desolate fluttering blue light mottled her tired face and the white she printed with a dancing dog and the words POOCHIE’S GRILL. Snipe turned off the lurching images and she opened her pale eyes. She was thin, a mayonnaise blonde with very light blue eyes like transparent marbles. Surly, ugly, she had a flat rump and beautiful strong legs with swelling calves. She was also getting tired of being broke, getting close to sniffing out Snipe’s longing for a gutter.

  “You got the job, I hope,” she said.

  “Ahhh,” said Snipe, grinning like a set of teeth on a dish, “there really wasn’t any job after all. We just played. But some very fine country stuff.” He tried to pump some of the old, boy-genius enthusiasm into his voice, to imitate the confident manner he’d used with Catherine two years before when they sat up until three in the morning drinking expensive wine she had bought and making plans for living by selling bundles of white birch logs tied with red ribbon to fireplace owners in New York City, or growing ginseng roots they would sell through a friend whose brother knew a pharmacist in Singapore. “Cath, this is an undiscovered group and there’s money there, big bucks—records, promotions, tours. The works. This could be the one, baby, it’s the one that could get us on the way.” He couldn’t keep the secret revulsion at the thought of success out of his voice. At once she was furious and shouting.

  “My god, no job! Gas and money wasted. I work my butt off down in that kitchen”—she plucked at her Poochie’s Grill shirt with disgust—“while you bum around playing free music. The rent on this place with its dismal rotten trees is coming up next week and I haven’t got it, and I’m not borrowing from my parents again. It’s your turn, buddy. Rob a bank if you have to, but you pay the rent!”

  Snipe knew she would get the money from her parents. “What’s so goddamn tough about making a few hamburgers to keep the ship floating?” he said. “I’ve got to build up my musical contacts here before I can expect to make any money. It takes time
, especially in the country. It’s more important I’m doing something I really like, you know that.” He couldn’t say to her that what he liked was the failing kitchen chair, the wrecked pickup in the weeds.

  “Something you really like,” sneered Catherine.

  Snipe was tired of the effort to cajole her. “Listen, bitch, you forget very conveniently about the months I worked in that butcher shop where nobody had more than two fingers so you could learn Peruvian weaving. Whatever happened to the Peruvian weaving scam, anyway? Remember, you were going to make a lot of money by weaving serapes or bozos or whatever for Bloomingdale’s?”

  Catherine’s failure to make any money at weaving was a dangerous subject. She flared up again. “You know they wanted indigenous Peruvian. I couldn’t help it if I didn’t live in a filthy hut on top of the Andes, could I? They didn’t want Vermont Peruvian.” She glared at Snipe with a horrible expression that reminded him of an early psychology book he had once seen with photographs illustrating the emotions: Catherine was HATE.

  Snipe wrenched a beer from the row in the refrigerator after shaking the empty scotch bottle and went out onto the dock. There were more Atlas cedars along the shore, their long arms hanging forlornly over the water. He looked across the lake at the winking lights along the road and drank his beer, feeling a pleasant pity rising in him. He wondered how much longer Catherine would last. She was spoiled by her rotten-rich mother and father, their soft lips folded, their soft hands slipping an envelope into her purse, not looking at him, writing letters that Catherine hid under the breadbox, long convoluted letters offering her trips to South America to study native weaving techniques, offering a year’s rental of a little shop in Old Greenbrier where she could sell the heavy mud-colored cloaks and leggings she made, offering her vacations with them in the Caribbean, but never mentioning Snipe’s name or existence. She’d leave him sometime. He thought about the Twilights on their mountain farm at the end of a bad road, turning the earth, sowing seed, and in the evening singing simple songs from their hearts in the shabby kitchen, poor enough no one cared what they did. The idea came to him that they must have made up all the rueful, hard-time songs themselves, songs that no one heard.

  There really could be an album, he thought, and maybe he could really guide them through the sharky waters of country-music promotion. They would wear black costumes, completely black except for a few sequins on the sleeves, black to set off the simplicity of their faces. The album cover would show a photograph of them standing in front of their ratty house, sepia-toned and slightly out of focus, rural and plain, the way he had told Catherine their own lives would be when they came to the country. Simple tunes in an old farmhouse, Shaker chairs by the fire, dew-wet herbs from a little garden, and an isolation and privacy so profound he could get drunk and fall down in the road and no one would see.

  But all the old farmhouses had been made over into doctors’ vacation homes with eagles over the door and split-rail fences. There wasn’t anything to rent until Catherine’s mother found “Cedar Cliffs,” a modernistic glass horror stinking of money and crowded by forty mammoth blue Atlas cedars set out at the turn of the century. The owners were friends of Catherine’s parents, and the deal went through before Snipe even saw the place and its melancholy arboretum. They were allowed a reduced rent of $300 a month because it was understood that Snipe would tend the great shaggy branches and clean up the litter of twigs and cones that fell from them in a constant rain.

  Snipe went to the Twilights’ every Wednesday. He said nothing to them about an album. Each time was like the first time, the same chair, the same headlong rushes into the next unknown tunes, the same closed silence with no talk of the music or the way it was played, just on and on in the gathering dusk. Snipe was carried along by the sound, he played in tune and on time, yet he rode on top of the music like a boat on a wave because old Eno wouldn’t make room for him, would not let them open the set pattern of their songs even a crack to let him play a riff or break or move out a little from the body of sound. Snipe, the outsider, was cast into a background corner, a foreign tourist who did not know the language, who would not stay, who was only passing through.

  He kept on trying to belong to them by cawing enthusiastically after a song, “Hey, all right, man! That’s really fine. Way to go!” He tried to soften Eno’s hardness with relentless questions about bowings and techniques that the old man scorned to answer. One night he asked him, “You ever play the guitar?”

  The old man stared blankly at Snipe for a moment, his lips moving in and out, then got up and laid his fiddle on the chair. He went into the back room off the kitchen, and they heard the metal snap of latches being undone. Eno came out with a guitar made of painted metal and on the back a picture of a Hawaiian hula dancer swaying beneath a coconut palm. “That,” said old Eno, “is a resonator guitar that my Uncle Bell give me in 1942. That’s the one we use when we work up a new song.” He looked over at Nell, stroked the woman-shaped body of the guitar with his old man’s hand, slid his finger under the strings and caressed the edge of the sound hole. Snipe felt some dark, unspoken words trembling in the room. He stretched out his hand for the instrument, but before he could touch it, Eno hustled it jealously into the back room. “I wouldn’t take nothing on this earth for it,” he said. When he came back to his fiddle, away they all went with “Fried Potatoes,” fat Nell belting out “French fries, home fries, potato cakes, potato pies,” but looking sidelong at Snipe—with complicity, he thought—as if she wanted to laugh with him at the old man’s tin guitar.

  That was the night he saw how the trick was done. It was Nell, not Eno, who controlled which songs they played, and the tunes, he saw, had all been arranged at some earlier time in unchanging sets of six or seven. If she began with “There Is a Stranger in My Room Tonight,” there must follow “Frozen Roses.” and then “Rain on the Roof Makes Me Lonely.” But if she began with “Lost Girls” or “Grass Fire,” different sets of songs followed. He noticed for the first time that she hummed a few notes of the key song in each set as a signal to the others of what was coming. In his back corner he had never caught it. It was Nell who was the master of the group, not Eno.

  Snipe began to play to her, even when old Shirletta trampled his filigreed arpeggios with her steely tremolo and Ruby drowned his fine, silken harmonics with flaring chords. He knew she heard note he sent her. Nell, who wrote the songs and melodies, Nell who wrung lyrics and music from her life as casually as water from a dishrag. Now, on the sepia-toned album cover in his mind Nell stood alone.

  He began to write a song himself, about the cedars—“I am a Prisoner of Some Green Trees”—and practiced for hours. The tune was a little like “Clementine.” Catherine would come home smelling of hamburgers and find him hunched over the guitar, reworking a tiny phrase with numbed fingers, the scotch bottle on the floor, his back bent in futile concentration. For it was obvious that he had reached some plateau of accomplishment, that despite the passionate practice (intended to keep him from looking for a job, said Catherine), his playing failed to become brilliant, his phrasing and intonation remained hesitant. Yet he continued to sing and bay. The two hours he spent in the Twilights’ kitchen each Wednesday sending musical messages to a fat woman with whom he had never spoken were the only times he felt he was approaching some form of happiness.

  He thrust his song at them one night. “I made up this song about some trees; like I really like them but they are keeping me from doing what I wanna with my life,” he said, not looking at Eno, and sang directly to Nell. The Twilights got the hang of the song right away and came in one by one, and when Nell sang in harmony with him “tall treees are my jail bars” he felt it was one of his life’s finest times. He wanted to play through the song again, but Eno pointed his bow at Nell in an abrupt slash and she took them into “The Fallen Fawn.”

  In late September the frosts began, shriveling the clumps of maidenhair fern but sparing the last spotted tiger lilies. The coarse, v
ivid green of summer dulled; the meadow grass lodged under the weight of the autumn rain. Catherine did not come home one night and Snipe knew she must have spent it with the new owner of Poochie’s Grill, a grinner named Omar, who had changed the name of the restaurant to Omar’s Oasis, put in four palms and a ceiling fan, and hung some of Catherine’s brown weavings on the wall as though they were paintings.

  Snipe had feelings of melancholy, noticed leaf veins, flakes of mica in rocks, extraordinarily fine hairs on plant stems. The smell of woodsmoke and damp earth made his eyes flood with reasonless tears. Late one afternoon he stood on the dock drinking scotch from the Mexican glass Catherine had brought back from the Acapulco vacation. He stared at a peculiar lenticular cloud. He could hear the sullen hum of a truck on the road beyond the lake. The truck’s buzz, and a tinny, faraway chain saw, made Snipe feel in a rush of misery that he had hardly had an hour’s true happiness. The chance for that had gone when he followed Catherine in false respect for imitation Peruvian weaving. He wanted fat Nell and the freedom of dirty sheets, wanted to sit in a broken chair and play music and not have to make a mark in the world. That night he lay awake listening to Catherine’s snores blending with the dying whines of cicadas.

  In the morning he waited until he heard Catherine slam the door and drive away with Omar. Then he rose, washed his hair and body, and dressed in clean clothes, wearing for the first time the black, silk shirt she had given him for his birthday. He drove down the gravel road between the hemlocks and turned onto the Twilights’ ruined track.

  Nell was alone in the kitchen making jelly. Shirletta, she said, had gone to town with her sister’s daughter to buy school clothes for the kids. Ruby and Eno were cutting firewood up in back. He could hear the chain saws in the maple sugar bush beyond the cornfields. The kitchen was flooded with the heavy, cloying perfume of blackberry jelly. Nell leaned her stomach against the sink and hummed. The jelly bag slumped flaccidly in a bowl like some excised organ from a slaughtered animal. There was crimson scum clotted in the sink where she had flung it, skimmed from the seething jelly in the kettle. Her hands were stained purple and a rose flush tinted her round, solid arms, the strong column of her neck. Her hair was wound up in shining thick braids. Jelly jars glittered the color of chambered pomegranates as they stood cooling on the table, translucent skins of wax hardening on the surface. The chain saws were as monotonous as the night cicadas.