AUDREY

Audrey suspected Harry’s sister-in-law Ruth had helped him plan their anniversary celebration. Maybe she had even suggested it. Dinner in a restaurant in Shreveport, then the Hayride show at the Municipal Auditorium: Louisiana’s own version of the Grand Ole Opry. When they were courting, Audrey had imagined her life would be full of evenings like this—dressing up, going out to eat in restaurants, going dancing or to a show or to the movies. They were going to live in America where people did things like that all the time, where women put on pearl necklaces and matching earrings to greet their husbands when they came home from work. All Audrey’s pictures of life in the USA came straight out of the pages of magazines.

She had given the USA a year of her life so far, and nothing in it looked like a movie or a magazine. She had never imagined a town like South Ridge, Louisiana, although when she complained about it in letters to her sister, Marilyn said it sounded no worse than any small town in Newfoundland. But Audrey wouldn’t have lived in a place like Candle Cove or Wesleyville or Bonavista. Not for any man she’d ever met would she have streeled herself off to some outport fishing village and lived like it was the last century. She’d made the mistake of assuming that going to America had to mean going to something better.

The Pickens family home was no smaller, in terms of square feet, than the house she’d grown up in. It might have even been a little bigger, though it was all on one level instead of the two storeys she was used to. And where the house at home had had Mom, Dad, four siblings and the shop, it had never felt as crowded as the house with Harry’s parents and grandmother felt to her. Their house was a bungalow that looked like it was sinking into the ground, and it always looked sad and run-down. Harry’s mother was forever painting windowsills and planting flowerpots, putting up new curtains, so there was no reason for it to look as tatty as it did. The house should have looked smart but it was as if the land was pulling it down, sucking it into the sandy clay, fighting Mrs. Pickens’s every effort to make it beautiful.

Harry said it would be better when they had their own place. He had a piece of land near his parents’ house and he had a little house framed out and roofed. “We’ll want that before any young’uns come along,” he said with his slow grin.

Audrey remembered Alf working on the house he was building for himself and Treese. Treese had been off her head with excitement about painting and wallpapering, picking out towels and sheets and collecting hand-me-down furniture from various relatives. Audrey wished she could feel some of that same excitement when Harry talked about their new house, but she would have been a lot happier if he’d said he would get them an apartment—even a little place, even two rooms—over a shop here in Shreveport, or any decent-sized town. Anything bigger than South Ridge, any place with shops and people instead of the endless empty miles of land and sky and those huge gnarled oak trees that looked like something had gotten out of hand and just kept growing, like cancer.

Harry’s father was aggressively silent: he could be in the house for hours without uttering a word. Audrey thought she had probably heard him say about a hundred words since she’d met the man. Harry’s mother only spoke when she needed to, usually to give Audrey directions about some chore. Some days, when the silence pressed down too hard, Audrey would sit out on the front porch. It was so hot, and a lifetime in Newfoundland had taught her that outdoors was always cooler. This clearly was not true in Louisiana; outside was hotter here, at least in the height of summer. Even under the shade of the porch the sun’s heat would hit her like a slap, she who had always thought, like everyone back home did, that heat was a good thing.

A warm sunny day at home was the thing that lifted your spirits, the thing you slogged on towards after a long cold winter. Here in Louisiana, heat was something else altogether. Harry’s sister had near to died of heat stroke as a child, his mother said. Near to died. Heat was something that could kill you if you stayed out in it, like the cold could at home.

But still she sat out on the porch. Outside, Audrey would look at the empty fields and imagine streets running up and down through them. Then she’d imagine houses, one after another, row upon row. Houses that huddled together and leaned on each other for support. She imagined voices, layering the yells of children and the shouts of their mothers calling them in for dinner over the lonely sound of the birds calling. She built herself a whole Rabbittown out of memories there in the fields in front of the cabin, and then she imagined the ping of the door behind her, people going in and out of the shop.

In letters to her mother and father she put the best face on it, told them about her chores around the house and what a good housekeeper Harry’s mother was and how kind she had been, none of which was untrue. In letters to Marilyn and Valerie and Lorraine, she made fun of the things that made her want to cry. She joked about how isolated the farm was, how tiny the nearest town, how backward and slow and silent the people were. She wrote these letters out on the porch, sometimes, or other times she’d be driven by the heat back inside to the table. The rare times that Mrs. Pickens took the old lady and they went to a neighbour’s house were the best, because Audrey was alone in the house and she could turn on the radio and listen to music.

The radio wasn’t on much, except for news and weather reports. Mrs. Pickens considered it a waste of time to listen to radio serials, and nobody in the house seemed fond of music. The Harry that Audrey had dated back home loved the hit parade and loved to dance, but Audrey had been sentenced to months of near silence in his parents’ house, except for hymns at the Baptist church on Sundays.

But tonight they were going to Shreveport. Audrey felt her spirits lift as they drove away from the too-quiet house in South Ridge. When Harry had suggested a night out in Shreveport for their anniversary and asked would she like to go see the Hayride show, Audrey knew Ruth must have given him the idea. But she pretended that it showed how well he knew her, how he understood her unhappiness and knew that music was the only thing that gave her either bit of comfort.

The first act was the Tennessee Mountain Boys. The headliner for the evening was Bob Wills, who would come on later; Audrey was excited about that because she had seen him in the movies as well as hearing him on the radio. She snuggled up against Harry, wishing he would be a bit more affectionate. He had his arm over the back of the seat but it wasn’t really around her, just lying there. She remembered how he used to hold her hand when they went to movies and concerts back home. Of course couples weren’t so affectionate after they’d been married awhile, but only a year? They were going to a hotel, and that had to be a bit more romantic than their bed in the room next to Harry’s parents’ room, with the walls that seemed paper-thin. She’d expected that over dinner, or during the show, he’d start acting more affectionate, saying romantic things like he used to say to her. Then later, when they had relations in the hotel room, it would be different from the hurried, almost shameful business it was in his parents’ house.

But Harry just sat there, tapping his toe to the music, his free hand beating out time on his knee rather than seeking her hand. A new singer came out, a tall dark-haired young man with a guitar, and Audrey hoped he’d sing something romantic, something that might put Harry in the right kind of a mood.

The singer talked a little bit before he sang, telling the crowd this was a new song he was just trying out and they were going to be the first people ever to hear it. His voice had that same southern drawl that everyone’s did around here. It sounded so exotic when she used to hear Harry talk back home, but accents like that were a dime a dozen all around her now. Audrey knew that deep drawl was like a round-the-bay accent back home: to some city folks, it marked a person as being from the backwoods, poor and uneducated. But when this man with the guitar opened his mouth, even though it was pure hillbilly, it gave Audrey a shiver. His voice was so slow and rich, it was like something poured over her.

Then he began plucking the strings of the guitar and the song rolled out, and though she had been listening to music all evening it was like this was the first song tonight, maybe the first song ever.

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill

He sounds too blue to fly

That midnight train is whining low

I’m so lonesome I could cry

Audrey wasn’t sure what a whippoorwill was—there were so many strange birds down here, all with their different calls, and the only birdsong she could remember from St. John’s was the harsh squawk of seagulls. But she did know the whine of that midnight train, and she knew the aching longing in the singer’s voice.

Sudden tears welled up in her eyes. What would Harry think? But he didn’t notice, didn’t look her way at all as Audrey, who never cried, let the tears roll down her cheeks.

The singer performed another song or two after that one, his voice as lovely, but neither one cutting to her heart the way the lonesome song did. It was his face that Audrey couldn’t keep her eyes off of, that long mobile face and those haunting dark eyes. When he stepped back from the microphone and the emcee repeated his name, she etched it on her memory. Hank, Hank Williams. She felt the way she did the night she met Harry at the dance at the Caribou Hut—like she had fallen in love, though only with a man who stood behind a guitar and a microphone half an auditorium away from her.

She wished she could buy that song on a record, to listen to it over and over, but of course they didn’t have a record player and she couldn’t see any way they could get such a luxury anytime soon. When Hank Williams left the stage Audrey scrubbed her face with her handkerchief to make sure no trace of tears remained.

Their hotel room looked like a palace compared to the narrow room with the sagging bed they had slept on all those long months. Audrey’s eyes roamed the room, taking in the firm, high white bed, the crisp bedspread, the polished wood of the bedside table with its lamp throwing a circle of warm light. Then Harry did that throat-clearing thing she hated and said, “Don’t seem like much for five dollars, does it?”

But they lay down together and made love, though not with the hungry passion that used to fuel them when they kissed and necked in a lane off Merrymeeting Road back home. Why was it so much less exciting once you were allowed to do it every night? In the dark, Audrey closed her eyes and pictured the singer’s face, heard his voice. Her mother would probably say that was a sin—picturing some other man while she was in bed with her husband. But Audrey was so lonesome, so lonesome she could cry.