Page 58 of Night Songs

“Come later, then. Whenever you want. It’s the one with the pirate flag on Blossom Road. I’ll be there.”

When I looked behind me, he was gone.

17lulabelle

1973

NINE YEARS LEFT

Tate lived on the far edge of town where the trees breathed. I found my way there the next afternoon, and we sat behind his house, watching them inhale and exhale.

We were waiting for the right moment to enter the woods. I wasn’t sure when that would be; something inside me would align, and then it’d be time. But right then, the world was still shifting. We were in this in-between space, this fuzzy black-and-white space, where the world around us hadn’t decided what it wanted to be.

I had never done LSD before, so I couldn’t be sure if this was normal. But it didn’t feel dangerous.

Tate dragged a finger across the top of my hand lying flat in the grass. I could feel the weight and quality of his mind in that touch, fizzing against my skin like powder mixed with vinegar. I looked into his eyes, and he suddenly blazed into full, radiant peaches and blues against the black and white.

The scene around us burst into color as well, and the trees stood before us, beckoning with their swelling purple trunks. He and I stood up. We clasped hands. And we walked toward the wall of nature like a portal.

In the woods, I took off my shoes and flung my wig onto a branch. I became a child again.

We walked slowly between the trees, touching every surface, savoring every sensation. If I looked at anything for too long, it would start to expand and unfurl. Moss sprouted small blooms and tree bark swirled into intricate patterns. My gaze had the power to unlock new life.

We found a little pond with a few fish wiggling under the surface. Tate told me about ice fishing in Minnesota where he’d grown up. They’d make a little house on the ice, cut a hole in it, and lower their line. His parents were conservative churchgoing people, but when they were out on the ice or crouching in a deer stand, his dad would let him have a bit of whiskey in his hot chocolate. The normal rules didn’t apply in these special places.

He asked me about my childhood, and I told him that I’d once slept for a week in an abandoned deer stand. It was summer, and in the absence of school, I needed an escape from my aunt’s family. I stole a blanket from the house and used dried weeds to soften the wood boards. I lived off wild blackberries and a sack of jerky I’d swiped from the cellar. When I finally returned seven days later, my aunt asked where I’d been all day. She needed help with the wash.

Tate asked me quietly what happened to my parents. I started to tell him the canned version of my story, the one I’d dreamed up in that truck on the way to Nashville and had given for years in interviews.

My parents were taken home to Heaven in a car accident, and I was raised by my loving aunt and uncle, accepted as one of their own in a beautiful mountain holler, where we loved God and lived a humble, peaceful life.

To tell you the truth, I was sick of that story.

I had kept my secrets so long from others, afraid of what would happen if I exposed them, and yet, the thing I’d feared had already happened. The person I loved most hadn’t believed me, had treated me like a dumb hillbilly, and I was still standing, wasn’t I? I didn’t want to hide anymore. Maybe now, I could live some version of the truth.

I asked Tate to sit in the leaves with me, and I told him that my father had left, and my mother had died at 33 from a family curse. I unbuttonedmy shirt and bared myself to him, showing him my tree in all its glory. The tree that killed my mother.

The air danced over my naked skin, and my breasts pebbled. I watched his face, searching for a glimmer of doubt in his eye. But he only stared thoughtfully, and after a long silence, he asked me what it was like to know I would die in nine years.

It was the same question Hess had asked me, and I wondered what that meant. Perhaps he really believed me. Perhaps not. It didn’t matter anymore, did it? This was my truth, whether he believed it or not.

I told him what I’d told Hess, that it weighed heavily on me, but it also inspired me to take risks. I didn’t live as if my days were infinite; I squeezed the blood out of life and painted my cheeks with it.

But that wasn’t the whole story, was it?

I’d been told all my life that I was a demon child, that I was going to hell. And so when I was little, I had often imagined where I was headed: a place of pain without escape, a place where the only sound was a terrible noise. It haunted me at all hours of the day—in my sleep, at my desk at school, in the pew at church.

That was the demon child’s greatest secret—she was very, very afraid. And it wasn’t just the idea of hell—it was that she was supposed to spend the rest of eternity there. And whenever she tried to imagine that cursed eternity, a terrible, suffocating feeling would overtake her, and she’d want to die—not twenty-five years from now, but right then and there, struck by lightning while her granddaddy gave his sermon from the pulpit. It would get so bad, she’d tell her aunt she needed to use the bathroom, and instead of going to the outhouse, the demon child would head into the trees, running through them until she was deep enough to hear the music drifting down in the shafts of sun.

Music is what had saved her—it allowed her to escape such thoughts, to live in a place where hell and eternal pain didn’t exist. If not for music, she might have gone insane.

The woods suddenly grayed and darkened around us. I stood up, tryingto clear the new mood, but it only deepened. When I put my hand on a tree to steady myself, I felt something wrong emanating from its bark. Dread seeped in like a cold liquid.

Tate looked at me with fear. He could feel it, too. “We need to change locations. Let’s go to my house.”

We fled the way we came, desperate to outrun whatever had descended over the woods. When I looked back, a thick fog obscured our trail, and the outline of a figure stood in the cloud, watching me. I ran faster.

When we finally returned to the field, I saw Tate’s house shining on the hill. This would be our sanctuary.