DIED 2005
SIX EGGS AND a pint of vodka, sure ain’t got much to lose, wailed the singer on the CD downstairs. My husband came into our darkened room and threw himself on the bed, his shoulders shaking, crying so hard he couldn’t speak. As long as I’d known him, I hadn’t seen him shed a tear outside a movie theater. It was a couple of days after Christmas, the first since the last of his brothers died. We’d been down to Germantown to take Jim’s widow out to dinner; afterward, back at the apartment, she had us go through the CDs. Take them all, she said, but there were too many. My husband filled a shopping bag with Stevie Ray Vaughan, Steve Earle, Little Feat, and the female blues singers: Sue Foley, Susan Tedeschi, Lou Ann Barton. Two copies of the only album ever made by the little-known Vala Cupp, a tiny redhead with a big voice who toured with John Lee Hooker for fifteen years.
After he stopped in Damascus for a pint of vodka, he was playing the CDs in the car, reminiscing as he rarely has. Music was what we talked about, he said, the only thing we ever really talked about. At home I went up to bed while he sat by the stereo, looking at Vala Cupp on the front of her jewel case. He got on the internet to see what she was up to. “Ms. Cupp had suffered for years from bipolar disorder and depression,” he learned. “Although surrounded by a circle of close friends in Austin and in frequent touch by email and phone with many friends around the nation, she had become increasingly withdrawn.” She answered the phone so rarely, her friends often had to call the police to get the door open. So she’d been dead for five days when they found her hanging in the kitchen, her dogs and cat dazed with grief.