Chapter Seventeen

If you’re not dead yet, you haven’t heard all the news.

—Krio Proverb

Hunter felt that the months spent at the parish pea farm had been hard, yet he felt lucky he hadn’t landed in Angola. Hunter knew a man who had done ten years there. He claimed that Johnny O’Neal had even written a song about him. Blacky talked a great deal about anything—anything that is, except what Angola was like. The only thing he said about Angola was that it was a place no man should be sent to, that it would be more merciful to just kill him.

Before his time in the parish prison, Hunter noticed, but didn’t understand Blacky’s intense criticism of his incarceration. Now he felt he understood Blacky a little more. Prison changes a man. It empties him, wounds him. He understood to a minor degree the misery and lostness that two of his friends experienced when they were arrested crossing the border and ended up in a Mexican prison—because of a single bullet the police found in the floorboard of their truck. They were still in prison there, and the two white boys would probably have to fight every day of their short life. Now he understood the sadness in the ballads of the old musicians who had sung about their own prison experience, the rage of poets and prophets and political prisoners. They all had stories that needed to be told. Hunter hadn’t been in prison long before he knew his music would change dramatically once he returned from his Ouachita Parish grave.

Hunter did his time, taking every work detail he could to pass the time and get out of his cell. He wrote Caitlin at least one letter every week, but he never mailed them. The one letter she had sent him when she left for Africa, made him think there would be no more letters from her. And there ’weren’t. Not one letter from a girl he had loved like no other.

During those months in prison, he also had no guitar, and his hands, so used to their world of movement along the six strings of his Taylor, felt awkward and lost. He still sang, silently in his head while around other prisoners, and softly to himself while he worked. Shortly before his arrest, Johnny O’Neal had given Hunter his new CD. At lights out, Hunter turned one of those songs into a nightly ritual and used it to pull him into troubled sleep. It’s true, Caitlin, he whispered every night. It’s true. His heart cracked a little more each time he sang the song and every time he thought of how he had lost her.

During the day, he kept to himself, managed to stay out of trouble, and in his little bit of spare time filled three steno pads with song lyrics and ideas. Most of the songs were about Caitlin. From the small prison library, he managed to obtain a map of Africa that he taped to his cell wall. Once in a while he placed the tip of his finger on Sierra Leone. The only thing he knew about West Africa was that Caitlin was there, and he wondered if she could feel the breaking of his heart.

After his release, his father gave him an old pickup. Hunter put a small camper on the truck, loaded his equipment, and went to Mississippi. He traveled, drinking himself senseless most nights, living in cheap motels while he played the clubs and casinos.

After disappointing gigs and a failed romance with the poet girl in Hattiesburg, Hunter went to Texas. He crossed Louisiana without stopping. He had some good times in Austin, even opening one night at Antoine’s for Jimmy Vaughan, Lou Ann Barton, and James Cotton. The club owners liked his music and guitar playing, so they hooked him with up with some producers who asked him to play guitar and sing some harmonies with them the next night at Austin City Limits. He accepted their offer and opened for the featured acts. After he was finished, he played backup rhythm guitar, perched on a stool next to a black percussionist who played a tambourine with a drumstick.

After the show, he went out with some of the band members and got trashed at a club while they listened to Miss Molly and the Whips. Hunter figured he must have had a good time because afterwards he couldn’t remember the musicians’ names or even the bar they had gone to.

When the gigs in Austin ran out, he moved on to Dallas where he found plenty of work. He was running high in creativity, yet Dallas felt empty. The money was good, the music came out okay, but his new songs never arrived, never connected to any heart as far as he could tell. The audience was distant, disinterested, and aloof, not at all like the crowds in Louisiana. The audience changed nightly, and Hunter noticed that a new audience never knew his music, and really never knew how to take his ballads and love songs into their hearts. One night he decided he had suffered long enough in Texas and phoned his parents and told them he was coming back to Louisiana.

“I didn’t think you’d be able to stay away from Louisiana too long,” his father said. “You reckon you’ll be here a while? Or will that Viking blood your mama’s family put in you get to stirring again and push you somewhere else?”

“I think I got most of that out of my system. After Dallas, I realized what a white-trash Southern peckerwood I am.”

“I don’t know what that’s saying about your mama and me, but I am glad you’re coming back this way. When will we see you?”

“I’ve lined up a gig in Ruston this Thursday, and one in West Monroe on Friday. I ought to make it home sometime after that.”

“Well, your mama’s been worried about you, Hunter. Time to settle down some, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. But I still have to find my way in some things.”

“Hunter, how are things with you and that Mississippi girl?”

“I don’t think things are going to work out with her.”

“I’m sorry, son. She sounded like a nice girl. You call us as soon as you get in.”

“I’ll do that, Daddy.”