The Devil's Dream (42 page)

He was up there touring with the New Cripple Creek Boys, a bluegrass outfit, so Annie May and me went over to the apartment where some of them were staying, and we had the biggest time, just like in the old days in Shreveport. Nobody has a good time in California, as I told Ralph, they are all too cool.

Ralph Handy laughed his big belly laugh at this, so I went on and told him about my drummer out there who was a Zen Buddhist and about how nobody eats meat or cooks their vegetables long enough. I told him about the food because I remembered how much he liked to cook and how he used to bring ham biscuits along when we traveled. One time he gave me and Wayne a marble pound cake for Christmas. “If you have a picnic in California,” I told him, “they bring
whole things
. They don't know how to have a picnic,” I said.

“What do you mean, ‘whole things'?” he asked.

“I mean like a whole cooked chicken instead of fried chicken or chicken salad sandwiches. Or a big old slab of cheese instead of pimiento cheese sandwiches.” All of a sudden I realized that I was making fun of Tom Barksdale's idea of romance, those picnics by the Pacific which had been the actual highlights of my time out there. Something like a light bulb clicked on in my mind—I felt smart again, and funny. But guilty, too—I'd been with Tom for about two years, off and on, by then.

“I don't mean to make fun of
Tom
,” I said. “I know how lucky I am to have him producing my records. I owe him everything.”

“Well, now, I'm just a old country boy,” Ralph Handy said—he always said this!—“but I ain't so sure about that. What it looks to me like,
he
owes
you
a lot. He's in
your
debt, and not the other way around, and don't you forget it, honey. It's your songs.”

I looked at Ralph Handy good. We were sitting in somebody's room someplace in Greenwich Village in New York City. There was a lot of smoke and a lot of people in the room, most of them musicians.

“Honest Injun,” he said, and smiled at me. This was something I had not heard since I was a child, growing up on Grassy Branch.

I let it sink in. I smiled back at him. I had always been crazy about Ralph Handy, who was comfortable being a big man, who was not embarrassed to speak his mind—a man that didn't know he had a bad haircut, who'd been playing music all his life. He had a wide grin, and looked you in the eye.

“How's your family?” I said.

“We-ell,” he said, drawing it out, lighting a cigarette. “That depends.”

“Depends on what?” I asked.

“On what you mean by ‘family.' The boys are fine—hell, one of them has gone and got married now! And Shirley's all right, I reckon. She's still in high school, so she's living with Jean.”

“You and Jean split up?” I said stupidly. I couldn't believe it! I remembered back in Shreveport, how Ralph used to talk and talk about Jean and the kids. He thought the sun rose and set on Jean.

“First Jean started getting these headaches all the time. Then she decided she had stopped growing as a person because she was married to me.” Ralph shook his head. “So I encouraged her, of course. I told her she ought to go back to school, do whatever the hell she wanted to do. Whatever would make her happy, you know. Whatever would make her grow as a person.”

“What did she do?” I asked.

“Well, she took a course or two at the community college, and she started taking yoga lessons, and she stopped having the headaches so bad. So naturally I thought, Fine. Now we're getting someplace. But then come to find out she wasn't really taking one of them courses, the one I thought she was taking on Tuesday and Thursday nights. No, she was sneaking out to be with her yoga instructor, who is a wimpy little guy about ten years younger than she is.”

“I can't believe it,” I said. Of course the sixties was a new world, but this was less true in the business than in the schools, for instance. It seemed like every time you turned on the television, some kids someplace were burning their schoolhouse down. The sixties didn't happen to everybody, though. They didn't happen to me.

“How did you find out?” I asked.

“Hell, they came in together one night and
told
me!” Ralph sounded so disgusted. “Jean said that a part of her was sorry for what she was doing, but the other part of her felt she had a right to be happy. She said she knew she was causing me pain, and then
he
said he had some techniques he could show me to deal with the pain. I showed their ass to the door,” Ralph said. “Now Jean and this yoga instructor are living in my house, and I'm living up over top of a Western Auto store. It don't make any sense to me. She don't look particularly happy either, whenever I go over there to see Shirley. But they've got a lot of nerve, I'll tell you that. Asked me for a loan the other day—can you beat it? Not to mention that I am still paying the mortgage on that house for Jean and her boyfriend to live in, until Shirley gets through high school. I must be some kind of a fool.”

“Honey, is he telling you that old sad story one more time?” Mooney Yates, who is one of the best banjo players that ever was, came over and put his arm around Ralph.

“It
is
pretty sad,” I said.

“You know what I tell him?” Mooney asked. “Me and the boys, we tell him he ought to get into some of this meditation himself, ain't that right, Ralph? Like this—
ommmmm
. . . ” Mooney started humming and about three more of them gathered around real quick and took it up, just like they were some kind of a crazy barbershop quartet.
“Mmmmmmm,”
they went.

I just about died laughing.

“Come on, let's get out of here,” Ralph said when they had finally quit. “Let's go take a walk.”

“It's raining,” somebody said.

“Well, hell, hasn't anybody got a umbrella?” Ralph asked. “For this little lady?” meaning me, and so then we got one and took off, leaving Annie May up there with the rest, happy as a clam. She thought she was real sophisticated, being in New York.

“All right!”
Ralph Handy said the minute we got out on the sidewalk. “All right!” He was standing out there bareheaded in the rain, he turned his whole face up to it.

Later I would come to understand that this was a man that you couldn't hardly keep in a house, a man born for the out-of-doors. Now it seems to me like I hardly even noticed the weather before I was with Ralph Handy, and then while I was with him I noticed everything—how cold it was, how hot it was, how the sun felt on my face, if the wind was coming up out of the east. It seems like we were outside all the time.

That first night in New York, we walked around the block in the rain, past queers and winos and hippies and Lord knows what all. Ralph Handy put his arm around me and kept me under the umbrella. I knew the rain was messing up my hairdo something awful, and I didn't even care.

“I'm glad I got up with you, Katie-bird,” he said. “I always did think you were a fine woman, and I'll be damned if you ain't just as pretty as ever.”

The street was full of people and slick with rain. Neon lights shone up at us everywhere out of the puddles, in a way that was just beautiful.

I knew I would see him again.

And sure enough it was not even a full month later that Ralph Handy called me up at eight o'clock in the morning. I was laying in the bed in my old house over on Harding Place not asleep but not awake yet, either, the way you do. Since I work nights I am not an early riser. I never take phone calls that early, either, but somehow Ralph had talked Rhonda into putting him through. Ralph could talk anybody into anything, and Rhonda purely loves to talk.

“Katie-bird, this is Ralph Handy,” his voice came booming out of the receiver, too loud for the a.m. “I want to take you out to breakfast.”

“That's real sweet,” I said, “but I don't eat breakfast.”

“What do you mean?” He sounded really puzzled. “A person has got to eat breakfast. I'll pick you up in half a hour. I know where you live.”

Then he hung up, before I could say no. And he was
there
before I could get ready, so I just went ahead on without my makeup. It was a sunny, cold December day where the grass crunches down when you step on it, and you have to wear sunglasses it's so bright. I wore jeans and an old sweater, we went in Ralph's jeep. I have to say, it gave me a start to see those Louisiana license tags.

“I did a lot of living down there,” I said to Ralph, pointing at the tag.

“Me too.” Ralph wore a black Stetson hat that looked really good on him, he looked like he was born wearing it. “I reckon I just about drank that state dry at one time. But then you get to a point, you know you've got to cut back or die,” he said. “I chose to cut back.”

“Me too.” I decided not to mention any of the big times I'd had in California, where I would have gotten in trouble again if I'd stayed any longer. I got in the jeep, which was nice and warm and smelled like cigarette smoke and after-shave. We drove out to the Loveless Café, where we sat at the front table by the window. Sun streamed in on the red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, and the waitress brought us big heavy white cups of steaming coffee right away. I was aware of Ralph's knees right across from mine under the table. I imagined the toes of his boots nearly touching my boots.
Girl,
I thought to myself,
you are a plumb fool
. For I had had plenty of men since Wayne Ricketts, and not felt so crazy and girlish about a one of them.

“What are you grinning at?” Ralph asked me.

“You,” I said real bold. “I'm grinning at you.”

Then the waitress came back and Ralph ordered for both of us, the biggest breakfast you ever heard of—scrambled eggs and biscuits, country ham and red-eye gravy. “I hope you're ready to eat all of that,” I said. “I told you I'm not a breakfast person.”

“You'll eat it,” he said.

Which turned out to be
true
! But first Ralph got me to talking by asking me a lot of questions, and he was fascinated to learn who my family was.

“You mean the
Grassy Branch Girls
?” he kept saying. “The
original
Grassy Branch Girls?” He was just knocked out. He said he couldn't figure out why he never had heard about this before, down in Louisiana, and all I could say was, it didn't seem very important when I was with Wayne. There wasn't any past or any future when I was with Wayne, nothing but Wayne himself, only I didn't say this, of course. Then Ralph wanted to know what everybody was doing now, and so I told him how R.C. never got over Lucie's death and he was still living up there in his old house on Grassy Branch with Little Virginia and her boyfriend, and how Mamma Tampa lived with
my
mamma, who had been so mean to me, and how Georgia had put Virgie in a rest home, suffering from premature senile dementia. Then I went on to tell about Rose Annie, who was out at Brushy Mountain State Prison even as we sat there that morning in the Loveless Café. I told him how I went to see her as often as I could, and collected all that stuff for the prisoners last Christmas.

“Now hang on! Just hang on! Just hold it!” Ralph Handy banged on the table. “You mean that's your
cousin
?” And I said yes, it was.

“Well, I don't know whether to shit or go blind!” Ralph Handy said, signaling the waitress for more biscuits, which he poured sorghum molasses all over. He ate them with his fork.

I had never talked so much in my life. I had never felt so
interesting
, either—there was a way Ralph had of looking at a person that made them feel like they had a lot to say. It was this single-minded quality he had of paying close attention, and looking right at you.

This was the kind of breakfast they used to serve up at Lucie and R.C.'s. I had not tasted sorghum molasses in years, but one taste of it made so many memories come flooding back. I told Ralph all about the molasses stir-offs we used to have up on Grassy Branch when Grandaddy Durwood was still alive, and how folks would come from far and near, and how good that hot molasses tasted when you dipped it up out of the stirring trough on a little piece of cane, and how the notes from R.C.'s banjo rang out in the still cold air. And all of a sudden I could
see
it—see the great fire and the full moon, it was like I was
right there
. Suddenly I knew it was time. I knew I'd be going back to see them before long. Ralph Handy told me about how he used to help
his
grandaddy cure ham—packing it in salt, then hanging it up to cure from spring to fall. He said this ham at the Loveless was passable but not great. Too salty.