Twang (37 page)

“I hate to say it,” I said finally, “but here lately it seems I’ve contracted a terrible case of songwriter’s block. Nothing but a vast wasteland these days. I’ll just do like Taylor and give a humongous donation.”

“Aw, I bet you could do it, Jenny girl. Bet you’d be surprised if you just closed your eyes and drifted back to another one of those tough times in your childhood.”

I hated Mike’s offhanded tone, like what he suggested was not some dangerous trek through a place littered with emotional land mines. “No. It’s like I’m totally barren. I’ve never, ever been like this.”

Mike frowned. He had creases between his eyebrows from worrying over bottom lines and business strategies. Over my career. For a while the only sound was the muted conversation of several patrons a distance from us. I thought Mike was finally accepting my news, that he realized I was a big enough star that I could refuse things.

I stood up after another bit, smiled. “Thanks for the coffee, but my head hurts and I need to get home.”

“Wait a second.” Mike reached into his pocket and handed me two envelopes. “Your fan mail.”

I glanced at a plain white business envelope, my name typed in black capital letters, and a fancy pink envelope, my name in blue cursive. “Thanks.” I slipped them into my purse, breaking out in an instant sweat. Many fans wrote, most asking for an autographed picture, or to be included in my fan club, and some sent along song ideas. But occasionally there was that letter from a tortured soul who needed a friend and decided I should be the one she poured her feelings out to.

I’d stopped reading my fan mail not long after “Daddy, Don’t Come Home” debuted.

On Thursday, the Cumberland River finally crested and started to recede. Parts of the city were still without power, others without water since one of the treatment plants was flooded. Every night, I watched the updates on recovery attempts, my heart still breaking from the way the Cumberland had mauled the city I loved.

One evening early that next week I sat very still on my leather couch at Harmony Hill, watching a special report. I gritted my teeth, clenched the remote, and cringed at the newscaster’s forehead creased with concern. “Torrential downpours on Saturday, May 1st, and Sunday, May 2nd, flooded the Tennessee capital of Nashville,” he began in a grave voice. “While the record rains in Nashville and Middle Tennessee have abated, life is far from back to normal for many, especially for those who’ve lost loved ones in the flooding. Or for those who’ve lost their businesses, their homes, and their possessions. It is especially hard for those without flood insurance, which accounts for the vast majority of homeowners whose homes were damaged.”

I stared at the screen as the camera panned a water-filled area full of floating trees, some two feet in diameter, ripped up whole and bobbing around like giant broccoli stalks. I was trying to wrap my mind around this image when the camera zoomed in on a portable school building that had torn loose and was floating down I-24 in the floodwaters, breaking up as it hit cars, trucks, and bridges. Next the newscast showed stretches of buckled asphalt, road surfaces with huge cracks, and a subdivision where folks were fleeing their homes because of water overflowing the banks of one of Nashville’s many
creeks. Recycling bins, trash cans, and doghouses swirled in angry torrents.

There came a voiceover saying the southeast side of town had been hit the worst, and proof came as camera footage of water in all its raging power ripped pieces of buildings away like Lego blocks. Electrical lines were tossed into the water where they snapped and snarled like high-voltage whips. Fences, signs, and outbuildings floated by in the murky waters like it was the end of civilization.

For the longest time I sat there gape-mouthed because what I saw on that screen seemed merely two-dimensional, incomprehensible, until finally I absorbed the fact that these were
real
scenes,
real
lives, and not some horror movie of death and destruction. I never dreamed it could rain so much! The sad drama became even more painful as it showed rescuers guiding boats and Jet Skis over frothing waters to pluck stranded residents from homes and cars. My heart nearly stopped as the voiceover listed the names of the ten Nashvillians who’d lost their lives in the flood.

The grave report continued, “Floods caused by the record-breaking rain caught many more than the folks in Davidson County off-guard, claiming more than thirty lives in fifty counties, and shattering countless more. There is an estimated one billion dollars in damage. While waters subsided in many places after the rain relented on Sunday evening, still more flooding occurred the following Monday due to the Cumberland River rising thirteen feet above flood stage. Muddy waters poured over the Cumberland’s banks, spilling into Music City’s historic downtown streets. Let’s go to the east bank of the Cumberland and take a look at our Tennessee Titans’ stadium.”

My eyes were riveted to a clip of LP Field on the television screen. It was full of dark brown river water, bits of debris floating around the mostly submerged goalposts. Was this
really LP Field, that sacred venue for the CMA Festival that held almost seventy thousand country music fans? My earlier hopefulness for the cancellation of the festival seesawed with hot prickling shame.

The camera shifted to another area hit savagely by the waters. “On Sunday night, flooding forced an evacuation of the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center, an area about five miles east of downtown,” said the voiceover. “One thousand five hundred guests were moved to a local high school.” The picture switched to an interior shot of the hotel where restaurant chairs and crates of wine glasses floated by.

I was still staring incredulously at the television screen when the camera zoomed in on a final image: a life-sized statue of Elvis, missing his guitar, lying on its back in the parking lot of the Wax Museum of the Stars.

I turned off the television. Tears ran freely down my face for the way the deadly water had filled the lungs of its victims, for their bereaved families, for the way it had laid waste my beautiful city.

I had something I needed to do.

I marched across the Pedestrian Bridge, through the parking lots of LP Field, to reach the bank of the Cumberland in late afternoon light. There were none of the usual joggers with their determined faces, none of the loving couples sitting and staring moony-eyed at the water, no dog-walkers or bicyclists. The Cumberland was practically deserted in her disgraceful state. The receding water had left behind a wild stretch of mud and debris. Hands in my pockets, the folded letters clenched in my sweaty fist, I walked, listening to the mud sucking at my feet with each step. Thick coats of goo began to cling to my boots like pancake batter, growing
heavier with each footfall as I picked my way downstream past trash and plant debris.

What had been a pleasant stretch was transformed into a dirty wasteland the grayish brown of a rat’s hide. I stumbled on a smooth stone the size of a muffin, threw it back into the river where it hit with a small glugging sound. It was going to require a ton of money and a lot of work to be ready for a music festival by June tenth.

All of a sudden I felt compelled to touch the river. I went sideways like a crab down the slick slope of the bank, squatted and trilled my fingertips in the water. As I did, my mind went zipping backward to my pilgrimages, those days I’d come here looking for renewal. I tried with all my might to recapture just one moment, desperate to feel that sense of sanctuary.

But it was like looking for a toothpick in a haystack where everything comes up a limp piece of straw. What was the Cumberland that I’d looked up to her so? Worshiped her in a sense? I’d once thought there couldn’t be any more serene, restorative place in the world.

Who was I kidding to think she could save me? She sure wasn’t the mother she’d claimed to be. Water that looked relatively safe on the surface moved quickly and dangerously below. I thought about her deception. How she rose up, abandoning her banks, exchanging her broad slow curves for a raging brown torrent that gouged paths of destruction, drowning everything for miles.

“You ain’t no saint!” I yelled, feeling like a protester for a worthy cause as I raised up tall, planted my boots firmly, stretched my neck, and aimed a mouthful of saliva into the Cumberland. I stood awhile, watching the foamy patch of spit on the surface of the water move slowly downstream, wondering,
Did that make me feel any better?

Walking downstream again, I heard a bullfrog’s bass notes of “jug-o-rum,” which brought to mind fishing with Bobby Lee, and then I recalled how frustrated he’d been when he couldn’t join the groups stepping in to help after the flood.
Not everyone is the center of her own universe, Jennifer
. With a pang of guilt I reached into my pocket and pulled the letters out.

Tucking a trembling finger into the edge of the pink envelope’s flap, I unsealed it and pulled out a piece of stationery printed with a butterfly border, and jam-packed with the handwriting of someone who put little curls on their capital letters and dotted their i’s with hearts.

Dear Jenny Cloud,

I want to thank you for your song “Daddy, Don’t Come Home.” I’m indebted to you, and I thank God for giving you the gift to sing. I’m going to try to put into words how much your song means to me, how God used it to help me feel like I could finally express myself. I, too, had, well, have actually, a father who is troubled and needs help. But I couldn’t find the strength to tell anybody what he was doing to me. I think part of my problem was I didn’t feel like I really mattered. One time I even tried to kill myself. Most of the time I was just scared to death. But I got strong through listening to your hit song! I looked at you, and I said, ‘If Jenny Cloud can be bold, I can too!’

So, I told my counselor at school about my father, and she stepped in and got me professional help. My life is much better now! For
the first time, I’m happy and sleep through the night. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

Love, Victoria

This was a victory song if I’d ever heard one! Something in me toyed with writing her back so we could exult together. I searched the envelope—no return address. I slit open the other letter before I lost my nerve. It was formal black lines of type, several words smeared.

Dear Jenny,

I don’t go around telling this because I’m afraid if people found out about it they’d think I caused it, asked for it, you know? But I didn’t, and I know you’ll understand and won’t be disgusted because it sounds like your father wasn’t the hottest on the planet either. I’m glad you had the guts to call him on his meanness and drunkenness!

My mother passed away when I was six, and my father is a perverted type of person who started messing around with me when I was eight. I’m fifteen now and it makes me absolutely sick that I endured it so long, but I was so scared and it wasn’t until I heard you singing about being brave, and then your interview on the radio, which happened to be on this night last year when I was at the end of my rope, and it felt like this voice was saying to me, ‘Haley, there’s your answer.’ I decided right then that it was time to do something about it. I went to my preacher.

Well, my father had to go get help somewhere far away, and I went to live with my aunt on my mother’s side who’s really sweet. She even looks like my mother! Well, it sure feels good to tell you how much you’ve helped me! Thank you for listening, and keep on singing your beautiful songs!

Your # 1 Fan, Haley

My hands were shaking as I stuffed both letters back into my pocket. Another flash of that night appeared on the screen of my mind. I heard my father’s drunken laughter, the catcalls of his friends, felt the hot flush on my chest as I gyrated topless, praying that any minute my mother would come out and save me from the shame. I saw myself later that night, the realization that my mother was incapable of standing up to my father, that we were utterly dependent on a man who was not only a drunk but also a depraved man in a multitude of ways.

It was not unlike turning on the television and finding that the place you ran to for security had no resistance beneath a couple days of hard rain.