The Devil's Dream (33 page)

But then she won some kind of a talent contest over in Kentucky, and first thing we knew she was on WHAS out of Louisville, and somehow ended up on the Renfro Valley Barn Dance, which was mighty high cotton indeed, with the likes of Red Foley and Aunt Idy Harper and Little Clifford, and the Coon Creek Girls. Virgie never sang solo on there, but she did have a little comedy act she'd do with the rest of them, and she sang in the cast, and on the
Sunday Morning Gatherin
' show too. Virgie hated Lily May Ledford, though, one of the Coon Creek Girls, and she got to telling tales about her, and eventually John Lair fired her.

Virgie bounced around from one radio station to another for a while then, not staying anyplace long, until she decided that an all-girl comedy act was the way to go, and came back to get me and Georgia. By this time she had got a reputation in the business as being difficult, which is the kiss of death, as there is always another girl from up in a holler somewhere just waiting to take your place, with a big country grin all over her face. She's nicer than you. She can sing better, too. So it don't do to be difficult. But Virgie was, and she was known for it, although me and Georgia didn't know it for a while.

At first we went right along with all of Virgie's ideas, since we surely had none of our own. Mamma Rainette and the Raindrops really
was
something different in the world of radio right then, I'll say that for us. For her role as Mamma Rainette, Virgie wore a funny hat with a huge black feather on it, a fancy red and black satin dress pinched in at the waist to where I didn't see how she could even breathe, red leather high-heel boots with silver toes, and a ton of makeup, including the longest false eyelashes you ever saw. Her dress was cut real low. The running joke in the act was that Virgie was trying to marry us (the Raindrops) off, so
she
could get a man before she was too old (not such a joke!), but our role was to be too stupid for marrying off. In fact we were supposed to be just short of retarded, and our act consisted mostly of telling dumb jokes to each other, such as the knock-knock jokes and Little Moron jokes that were real popular then. Our radio names were Bitty and Elvira.

In all the Little Moron jokes, the Little Moron came off smarter than we did! There was a couple of skits that were right funny, though, one in particular that got us in hot water with the station. It featured me and Georgia as Old Farmer Brown and his Old Wife, and it went like this. (We were supposed to be sitting out on the porch talking.)

We were country as they come. At first, I didn't know any better. Later, I came to hate it, wearing those crazy getups she made us wear, straw hats and bloomers and big black clodhopper lace-up boots, our red-checkered dresses buttoned up wrong.

But I had to admit, the crowds at the Old Dominion Barn Dance just ate us up, and I do love applause as much as anybody. We were a big hit. The Barn Dance even took a bunch of publicity photos of us to promote the show, and put up four big billboards with our pictures on them twenty feet high, grinning like the fools we were. Georgia and me made Virgie drive us out Monument Avenue in Richmond every day to look at ourselves on our billboard, we just couldn't get over it! We were as big as General Lee, and lots more important!

Naturally, as I said, the boys started coming around, and it wasn't long before I was going with one of them in particular, Hank Smith, and it wasn't long before we were rubbing up against each other on the dance floor until I couldn't breathe right, and it wasn't long until I was sneaking out with him after hours, into the dry cleaner's where he worked, that he had a key to, and laying with him across those big old soft tables where you press men's shirts, and the streetlights came in the windows all pale and ghosty where the shirts hung on hangers all around. Maybe I knew, in some part of my mind, that this was wrong—I can't say for sure if I knew it or not, though. I can't say for sure if it was wrong or not, either. I was not real sure I wanted to be a good woman, anyway, as I said. Look where it had gotten Mamma!

When I thought about Mamma and Mamma Tampa up on Grassy Branch, it all seemed so long ago and far away, like somebody else's life in another country. I liked Richmond, where the streets were full of people and the streetcars ran up and down and you could get your fortune told or buy a piece of hot chicken on the street corner or see a Negro tap-dance in a big box of sand.

I didn't think about Chicken Rise church at all, despite how much time I'd spent there, for Virgie didn't care if we went to church or not, and Hank Smith and I liked to borrow a car and take a picnic out to the James River on Sundays. Or sometimes we'd go to Hollywood Cemetery, which I loved, it was all cool and beautiful in there. One little girl's dog had died right after she did, pining away for her, so there was this beautiful statue of the dog right beside the headstone. It was so sad. There were dead babies, too, lots of them, with little lambs or roses or angels on their graves. This is where I got the idea for my song “The Littlest Shepherd” from, you know it is about a baby angel that shepherds the lambs. We used to sit right on the graves in the soft mossy grass, and then I'd lay back, and then he'd kiss me. Hank Smith was a great kisser for his age.

Which was my age exactly, seventeen. He lived with his uncle and aunt, and sent half of his wages home to his mother, a widow in Danville. His daddy had been killed in the war, and Hank was an only child. His mother couldn't work, she had palpitations of the heart. When his aunt and uncle told her how much time he was spending with me, she had a cousin drive her to Richmond to talk some sense into Hank. Of course she couldn't, and went home mad, and when I'd missed three periods in a row, Hank and I got married.

I didn't have the nerve to ask Virgie to come. Georgia was the only family member present, arriving by taxi at the very last minute. We were married down at the big courthouse by Judge Roy Reardon, solemn as God Himself.

Hank wore a blue suit and I wore a beautiful pale green wool suit with a matching green hat and a little illusion veil, all of which Hank had borrowed from the dry cleaner's. Later he took them back and ran them through again, and no one was the wiser. I often thought about the people that owned those clothes, how surprised they'd be to learn they'd been in a wedding! I have two pictures taken on my wedding day by a Negro photographer down at the courthouse who did this all day long. Here we are with Georgia. Here we are just the two of us, holding hands. We look like children. We
were
children.

And yet I have to say, Hank Smith was sweet. He was no city slicker, but a nice boy whose whole heart showed in his eyes. He was not a boy for the long haul, but how can you tell? Georgia married not long after, and she's still married—shoot, she's a grandmother now! Live and learn.

After the wedding ceremony, which took only about a minute and a half but was one of the nicest wedding ceremonies I ever had, I have to say, because we were so young and so full of hope I reckon, we walked outside to find that it had started to snow like crazy, not a car was moving, and they had turned on the streetlights early. It seemed like a blessing, that snow. It made Georgia and Hank and me act like kids, running down the street throwing snowballs at each other in our fancy wedding clothes, giggling and whooping all the way home, the longest walk in the world, all across Richmond, to come in dripping and giggling and exhausted finally at the boardinghouse on Floyd Avenue, where Virgie had gotten real worried about us by this time.

“I got married!” I hollered, and then me and Hank fell in a pile in front of the fire laughing.

Virgie was not a bad sport. She took a good long look at us and said, “Well, I'll be damned!” and then, “Congratulations!” She went upstairs and got some rum, and Mrs. Marblehead, who ran the boardinghouse, got out some fruitcake and made coffee, and one by one the others in the house came down, until we had a real party going on. It was my new husband Hank and me; Georgia, Virgie, Mrs. Marblehead; Mr. Ralph Johnson, a traveling salesman who wore a toupee; Miss Harriet Lumpkin, a registered nurse; a Mr. and Mrs. Livingston Hall from Baltimore, who were in Richmond on temporary business; old Mrs. Wright, who had lived there for years and years; and the pale little clerk, John Umstead, who never spoke a word. After a while we started to sing, naturally, and found that John Umstead had a wonderful bass voice, even better than R.C., and that Miss Lumpkin was a trained soprano. Miss Lumpkin really showed off on “Mighty Lak a Rose,” which Virgie played to everyone's astonishment on the piano. I didn't have any idea Virgie could play the piano like that.

The snow piled up outside, higher and higher, until the streets were filled with people marveling at it. It was the most snow Richmond had had in twenty years. Hank and I fell asleep on the rug in front of the parlor fire, and Mrs. Marblehead covered us up with a quilt sometime in the night and let us sleep there.

It was a fine wedding night, to my mind. We woke early on Sunday morning to the blinding glare of sunshine off the snow, and the wild ringing of every church bell in Richmond. I looked over at Hank to see if he was awake, and he was laying there grinning at me. He had floppy brown hair, and a cowlick that fell down over one eye. “Why does the Little Moron take off all his clothes and run out in the snow?” he said.

“I don't know,” I said.

“I don't know either,” he said, and then he kissed me.

When Mr. and Mrs. Livingston Hall left, Mrs. Marblehead gave me and Hank their bedroom, the biggest and nicest one in the house, overlooking the gaslight on Floyd Avenue instead of the back alley. The curtains in that room were made of Irish lace, and the light from the bay window coming through them at night cast a flowery pattern across us in the big old four-poster bed and across the whole room. It looked beautiful. It was the prettiest room I had ever been in, anyway, that's for sure, with its antique chest-on-chest and a real oil painting of some castle in another country.

I didn't tell Virgie I was pregnant until I had to, until I just couldn't button up the front of my red-and-white-checkered dress. Then she guessed it. Backstage after the show one night, she lit up a cigarette and squinted at me shrewdly through the smoke. “Well, when's it due?” she asked me.

“May, best I can figure,” I said.

“Goddamnit!” Virgie looked like she was going to cry, a sight I had never seen. “Goddamnit, Katie, why did you have to go and do
this
? You could have made it, you've really got something, something I would have given my eyeteeth for.” She gazed off through the smoke, tapping her foot. “You're a damn fool,” she said.

Virgie kicked me out of the act two weeks later, replacing me with a Richmond girl named Ernestine Dodd, naming her “Petunia” for the act. Petunia wore my clothes and learned my jokes in no time flat. It was the strangest feeling, sitting out there in the studio audience watching her.

I was too big to work anywhere by then, so I just mostly laid on the bed with my feet up, reading magazines and fooling around with melodies on my guitar, picking things out. I wasn't writing songs yet, but I was getting close to it. The bigger I got, the harder it was to sleep, and I'd often wake up in the night with a tune running through my mind so loud and clear I'd have to get up and write it down. No words, just the tune. I couldn't go back to sleep if I didn't write it down, the tunes were as demanding to be born as the baby herself.

Annie May came on the last day of May, with the weather so hot I'd done nothing but sit in a tub of cold water the day before to keep cool. Hank was at work at the cleaner's. Thank goodness it happened to be Miss Lumpkin's day off. She went with me to the little hospital over on Stuart Circle, where we had arranged to go, and I was in labor for nearly twenty-four hours before Annie May was born. It was awful. I named her Annie for Rose Annie, May for her birth month. In spite of my long labor, she was beautiful, not red or twisted like some of the other babies in the viewing room.

I held her out to Hank, who had not been in the room when she was born; they didn't use to do that back then. I think the modern way is the best way, myself—let the men see how bad it hurts! Maybe they'll keep that thing in their pants a little better after that. Anyway, Hank did not take to Annie May then or later. Maybe he was still too much of a baby himself to want another baby around. I don't know.

“Looky here,” I said, lifting her little pink gown to show him all of her toes, little round perfect toes like pink pearls.

Hank looked out the window, sucking in his breath. “I reckon I'll call Mamma,” he said.

“Well, tell her that her granddaughter is just beautiful,” I said.