AUDREY

She took the five o’clock out of town, changed trains in Shreveport, and travelled through the night. “We’re taking a little trip!” she had told Hank. She hadn’t told Harry anything. Packed and left while he was at work and didn’t leave so much as a note. She knew that was wrong. She should have left a note or something. What would she tell him when they came back home? How could she ever explain running off to Alabama for Hank Williams’s funeral?

Those were the thoughts that kept her mind churning and her hands trembling throughout that dark night ride. Eventually, when Hank fell asleep across her lap, she dozed off too, waking fitfully every time the train pulled into a station in some tiny town and passengers around her got on and off. They changed again in New Orleans, Hank so sleepy he was almost like a piece of luggage. She had her own big suitcase and a little one for him. She had packed way more than they’d need to go to Alabama for two days. When Harry got home and saw what was missing from the closet, he would think she had taken the boy and run away for good.

By the time the train stopped in Montgomery, her neck and back were all stiff and sore and her eyes felt like they’d been rubbed with sandpaper. Hank woke confused, twisting his head up to look at her and say, “Where are we, Mama?” That little drawl in his voice that made him sound like half a stranger to her. “I’m hungry.”

“Me too, honey. We’re going to get off this train now and find a place to get some breakfast.”

They found it—scrambled eggs and grits—in a diner a little ways from the station, after Audrey had put their two suitcases in a locker. She’d come back for them once she figured out where they were going to stay tonight. The diner was busy, and the waitress, a chatty middle-aged woman with bottle-blonde hair piled high on her head, said, “Looks like half Alabama’s come to town for the funeral.”

Audrey nodded. “That’s what we came for, too.”

The waitress’s face softened, as if they shared a common loss. “It’s a cryin’ shame, ain’t it? Him so young, and so much talent. Folks ‘round here have always been proud of him. Where’d y’all come from?”

“Louisiana, up near Shreveport.”

“That’s a long way to come, just for today.”

“I loved his music a lot. I seen him once, at the Hayride. I just—wanted to be here.”

The waitress laid a pitcher of syrup on the table along with their plates. “That’s what folks are saying,” she said. “They say the hall will be all full with the important folks, but they’re settin’ up speakers in the park across the way for folks who want to hear the service. If y’all’da been here yesterday you coulda gone past and seen the coffin, they say thousands of folks did.” Audrey knew she had to be careful about every penny, but she left the waitress an extra nickel as a tip.

It would be easier to do this if she were on her own, to follow the crowds till she came to the park outside the auditorium, where people were already gathering for the funeral service at one o’clock. She could even have come yesterday, filed past the coffin, seen his face for the second time, closed and peaceful in sleep. But she couldn’t do any of it easily today, with a three-year-old in tow, whining about the heat and about being thirsty. “Where are we going, Mama? Can I go play? Play in the park?”

There was no place to play; it wasn’t that kind of park. Just a little grassy square across the street from the city hall, and even if it had been a place for children to play, it was too crowded. There was barely space to stand, and all over she saw squirming children held by their parents’ firm hands.

A woman nearby gave Audrey a smile of sympathy. “It’s hard for a young’un to understand, ain’t it?”

“It is,” Audrey said. “He’s named after Hank Williams, I just wanted him to be here today, so he’d be able to say, later, that he was here.”

“Seems like the least we can do,” the woman said.

Was that really why she had brought little Hank? “This is the man you were named after,” she told him on the way over to the park from the diner this morning. “I called you Hank because of him. He’s the one who sang all those songs we like to sing along with on the radio, you know?”

“Like about the whippoorwill,” Hank said. “And the jambalaya.”

“That’s right.” Now she tried to quieten Hank down as the crackle and hiss of the speakers announced that the service was about to start. The park, and the streets around it, were packed with more people than Audrey had ever seen in one place in her life. Nobody around her had even tried to get into the municipal auditorium. “I talked to a man who lined up all last night to get in this morning,” said someone nearby, “but there’s only about twenty-five hundred it can hold, and they do say there’s more like twenty-five thousand people come to town just for the funeral.”

When she’d thought about coming she’d imagined, of course, that she would be inside the auditorium. Probably all these people crowded around her imagined that too. She’d thought she’d be able to see Hank Williams up front in the casket, that it would be like being at a church service. She hadn’t imagined little Hank at her side, wriggling and trying to twist out of her iron grip on his wrist. Yet she’d never even considered leaving him home with his father.

There was a pop in the speakers, and then quite suddenly a man’s voice, deep and resonant, flowed out of them.

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures…

The old psalm, recited so often to her by Ellen, memorized in Sunday School, stilled the crowd, line by line, till when it ended they were all hushed as if they really were in church. Surely goodness and mercy had not followed Hank Williams all the days of his life, but perhaps he would dwell in the house of the Lord now, at last.

The preacher finished the psalm and announced a “coloured quartet” whose harmonizing voices came out of the speakers next. Then it was back to the Scripture, with the part from 1 Corinthians—wasn’t it?—the bit about the dead being raised incorruptible. Old words, comforting even if you didn’t know whether you believed them. O Death, where is thy sting?

The crowd in the park stayed quiet, except for a few squalling babies. Folks gave the mothers of the babies dirty looks, and when Little Hank interrupted to whine, “When are we going home?” Audrey squatted down to whisper in his ear, “You be quiet now, or I am going to give you a good lickin’ on your behind, so just hush up!” Her voice must have been fierce enough to convince him because he folded cross-legged onto the ground at her feet, playing with the toy truck she had had the good sense to put in her purse. For the next little while only the weight of his small body against her feet and ankles reminded her that he was there.

More Scripture, then the minister introduced Roy Acuff, who said a few kind words about Hank (“No finer boy has ever come or gone, as far as we’re concerned”) before he began singing Hank’s own song, “I Saw the Light.” All around Audrey, people wept openly, but Audrey was dry-eyed.

It was as if she had come all this way for the funeral thinking she’d see and hear Hank himself, like she did that night at the Hayride, and while that was clearly a crazy thought, she did have that feeling of letdown. As if she’d bought a ticket for a show where he was on the bill, and then found out that he’d cancelled, last minute. Why had she expected that standing with a crowd of people outside his memorial service would make her feel closer to Hank Williams?

Little Hank stood up and started pulling at her skirt. “Can we go now, Mama? Can we go?”

“You hush that youngster up,” snapped the man next to Audrey. Everyone was straining to hear the preacher speaking over the public-address system now, and Audrey bent down again to hiss another threat into Little Hank’s ear. He should have been home with his daddy, she thought. He wasn’t going to remember this day anyhow. The preacher was talking now about Hank, but not really about Hank, after the first few minutes. It was all about America and Jesus. America, such a great country, where even a little shoeshine boy could grow up to sing songs that were loved by millions. And Jesus, everyone needed to just put their hand in the hand of Jesus and it would all be all right when God called us home, like he just called Hank. Lots of tribute to how much everyone loved his songs, but not a word about the man’s struggles. He wrote “I Saw the Light” but it seemed to Audrey, following the gossip in the papers these last months, that mostly he saw darkness, and tried to sing his way out of it. You wouldn’t talk about that at the man’s funeral, of course—you wouldn’t mention his drinking and divorce and all the nastiness. Don’t speak ill of the dead.

The last hymn was another quartet, this one singing “Precious Memories,” and around Audrey, the people gathered in the park joined in the singing, first a few thready voices and then more and more until it was a chorus that swept her up. Little Hank was still wriggling and twisting around the hem of her skirt and she gathered him up in her arms, nestling him on her hip. Lulled by the voices around, maybe, he stopped fighting her and snuggled in, drooping his head on her shoulder.

Audrey sang along, all the voices rising together, and in the middle it hit her that she travelled all these miles as if somehow thinking she’d hear Hank Williams sing again, and the truth was, he never would. Not this song nor any other. She’d never see that long, sad face she remembered so vividly from that night at the Hayride, the night she pictured Hank Williams instead of her husband next to her in bed. It was over, all of it—Hank Williams’s young life, and her own marriage, and whatever bundle of hopes and dreams she had dragged down south here with her. She no longer wondered why she had hauled her son along to a funeral he was too young to understand, or why she had packed two suitcases. Or what she would say to Harry when she went back.

Tears were rolling down her cheeks at last—what a relief to be able to cry, here with all the other crying people, all this sadness in one place. Little Hank reached up his hand and patted her wet cheeks. “Don’t cry, Mama.”

When the hearse had gone past and the speakers had hissed to silence and the crowd began to disperse, Audrey sagged onto a bench under a tree while Little Hank ran around and round in circles. She needed someplace to stay for the night—some boarding house where they could get a meal and a decent night’s sleep.

Audrey had been thinking for months—years, maybe—that she could go on like this, that things would get better someday. New Year’s night had made it clear that she’d been lying to herself. She must have known—packing those suitcases, buying that one-way ticket—that she wasn’t coming back. Coming home. She had never once said that in her mind about South Ridge, Louisiana, about the house she shared with Harry. Never described it as home.

She went back to the train station, dragging a tired Hank. She would get her suitcases back, ask someone there about boarding houses near the station. Fifty cents should get them both a room for the night.

She looked at the big board with train times and destinations. A train was leaving in a few hours for Washington, DC. A big city, with connections to other big cities. She asked the man behind the counter what it would cost for a ticket to Washington D.C., and beyond that, one from Washington to New York.

If she could get past Washington, she’d be out of the South. In New York, in Brooklyn, her father and her mother both had people, aunts and uncles who had settled there. She could make a long-distance call home, get an address, turn up on their doorstep, and they would take her in. They were family.

“You’d be lookin’ at about forty dollars for the whole trip, ma’am,” the ticket agent said. “That’ll be for yourself, and a child’s ticket for the little boy…and you’d need to change trains….” His voice drawled on but Audrey stopped listening when he said forty dollars. She had taken twenty—she thought of it as stealing, knew Harry would see it as stealing—to come here, and the tickets from South Ridge to Montgomery had cost half of that. She could get back to Harry if she turned around and bought a ticket right now, but that was all she’d be able to do. If she bought a ticket back to South Ridge, she wouldn’t have enough left to rent a room or buy a meal.

She thanked the man and went to sit down on a bench. Hank was crying for something to eat. Somehow, in less than forty-eight hours, Audrey had become a woman who had stolen money, run away from her husband and abducted their child, a woman with no home and no place to go. She could still go back, tell Harry about the funeral, apologize for being so reckless and foolish. Take her medicine.

Instead, she went into the nearest snack bar and bought a bag of chips and a Coke for Hank, then went to the pay phone. She hadn’t made a long-distance call once in the time since she had left home; Harry would have been horrified at the cost. Long distance was for emergencies. She didn’t want to have this emergency, to throw herself at her parents’ mercy, but the only other choice was the one thing she could not do.

As the operator connected the call and she listened to the distant ring on the other end, Audrey thought of the comments she had heard Ellen make about divorces, which were rare in the neighbourhood when Audrey grew up. Putting up with it, making the best of a bad situation—that was the rule. Ellen might well tell Audrey to stiffen her upper lip, buy the next ticket back to South Ridge, and submit herself unto her husband.

“Hello?” It wasn’t Ellen; it was June, her voice young and light, crackling over the miles.

“I have a collect call from Audrey,” the operator’s voice said. “Will you accept the charges?”