Nashville Chrome (29 page)

Jefferson Eads shrugs and tells her he can't explain it, that he works by instinct. "You're hungry," he says, "you're desperate. You're clawing at the earth. That's all I know. That's all I need to know."

Sensing that he's losing her—and he's cross about this, too—he calls it a day, tells her she can go back inside and have a glass of water.

And once inside, his demeanor changes, as if he's suddenly sated. He becomes a young boy again rather than a tyrant, and where previously he was interested in only the camera and the cold technical impassivity of light and sound, he is now interested in her life again. The camera's rolling again—the camera's always rolling—but he's not being so dictatorial; he's just a boy again, curious about the treasure of her life, and is drawn to her, like so many before him.

All she ever had to do was wait: everything came to her, always, and she had only to wish for something and it would eventually be given to her. The only flaw in the miracle was that it was never enough.

T
HE DIRT-POOR
hardscrabble life of chronic poverty had not been hard. Seeing her audience slip away was what was hard.

The greatness wasn't leaving her. Maybe if it had, the slipping-away of audiences would have been easier to tolerate, would have been less lonely. It would have been a bitter loss, but one that she thinks she could have managed. But what gravels her is that the greatness didn't leave.

It left Elvis. They went up and saw him once, after his peak but before his decline. It was 1970, a full decade after their own glory days.

Despite still being atop his own summit, Elvis knew something was wrong, and was quiet and somber, lonely, barely recognizable in spirit from the young man they had known only ten years earlier. He was the opposite of the Browns now: the greatness had left him, but not the audiences. If Maxine had looked more closely she would have seen that that was even lonelier than her own condition.

After years of silence, he called for them, not by phone, as he had in the past, but via the mail. He had a secretary but had not used her, had written the note himself:
Please come and visit.
He had sent it to the only address he knew, the old one, where it sat unclaimed in their mailbox for months until Jim Ed had been back home during hunting season. The young trees growing up around the sawmill now were already almost thick enough to make into lumber.

Jim Ed stayed a week, hunting by himself and camping in the old house of his childhood, sleeping on the floor next to the woodstove, lulled by the popping of the coals, and surrounded by all the old ghosts. When he arose early to make coffee, it seemed that they were all there with him, still sleeping, and each morning he walked down into the woods and into the darkness, where he sat in his tree stand quietly and watched the sun come up, and was amazed by how fast the world kept moving, whether he was in the center of it or not.

At the end of his week, feeling strong and rested, he went back to his home in Nashville, called Bonnie, who said, "Why not?" and then Maxine, who said, "Maybe he wants to do a special album with us."

Jim Ed shook his head. "I think he's just lonely, Max," he said. "He said he just wants to see us. It's not about music at all," he said, "it's just about us."

Maxine paused, absorbing the disappointment. "Well, let's go anyway," she said.

He had offered to send a car and driver—Jim Ed had winced, remembering the time Floyd had loaned his car to Elvis, and once again felt surrounded by the ghosts—and he told Elvis thanks but that they would just drive over in Jim Ed's car.

"It's a big place," Elvis said. "You can't miss it." Jim Ed laughed, thinking it was his old humor, but then was concerned when Elvis said, "What's so funny?"

Like a boy, he was waiting for them at the front gate when they drove up. His father, Vernon, was there with him, had been staying with him for about a month, and Elvis gave each of them a hug, a stage hug at first, but then it dissolved into something denser and more powerful, so that for them it felt as if they were each helping hold him up.

He spent a couple of hours showing the Browns all around: showing them this and that bedroom, bathroom, closet. Then they went back outside and walked around on the grounds for a long time. It was cold and windy, and the Browns couldn't remember ever having been to a lonelier or more unsettling place in all their lives.

They walked forever. Vernon walked with them, a skinny little old man, and at one point he took Bonnie aside and said he was sure sorry that Elvis and Bonnie didn't get married, that Elvis had told him that they were going to. Which was not the truth—she had never told him yes—but there was no need to tell Vernon that. "He's sure a sweet boy," she said instead, and Vernon said, "Yes, he is."

The Browns thought it was strange how he'd gone so long without seeing them or talking to them and then contacted them from out of the blue. At one point Maxine commented on this, trying to break the strange awkwardness that seemed to be around them, and that she thought he might have had some kind of shared album in mind, but Elvis shook his head and said he just wanted to see them was all. He said he'd been hearing them on the radio now and again and thinking about them a lot, and that he missed them. He said he was pretty sad most of the time. He wanted something from them, but they couldn't tell what.

Vernon got cold and went back inside. The rest of them sat out on the hood of one of his cars—a gold Cadillac convertible—in that cold wind, and talked about the old days. He had on a big white coat with some kind of fur around the neck, so he was warm, but the rest of them were cold, and the hood of the car was cold. They didn't mention the incident with Floyd's Oldsmobile, and Elvis didn't bring it up either. They had no reason to believe he even remembered it.

He was so lost, Maxine recalls. The car was parked out on the lawn right by the front gate, and the Browns had to be leaving soon. They had no doubt that he wanted to leave with them, wanted to go back to the way things had been. That whole day, the only time he looked even remotely happy was when he told them about one of their past hits he'd been thinking about, a single called "M-O-N-E-Y." He said he couldn't get it out of his mind. He got real animated then, told them how he'd like to hear it played—how he'd like to play it, if it was his song—and he started tapping it out right there on the hood of the car, and singing it, and for that little bit, he was like the old Elvis again, and they had to say, he was right, the song sounded pretty good the way he was doing it.

Then they went home. They each gave him another hug and went on through the gate, and none of them ever went back to Graceland while he was living. If any of them saw him three times after that, before he died in 1977, they can't remember when they would have been. He was mostly somebody else by that time, and Maxine thinks he didn't want them to see that that was how it was.

It didn't change how any of them felt about him—there was nothing that could make something like that, so deep-rooted, go away—and Maxine has to believe that even when he was lost, even after he had gone so far away that he could never get back, he still always felt the same about each of them, that nothing had changed. But that was the last time they spent with him that had even a trace of good old days to it, there when he was tapping out that song on the hood of that hideous gold brick of a car. Just for a second, and then he was sad again.

What could any of us have done?
Maxine wonders. He had everything in the world, but he still needed them. Why did he call them up there? All he had to do was ask and they would have done anything for him.

He wouldn't ask. He just wanted to see them again. He called them to come up there but he could never say why he wanted to see them.

By 1962, the Browns were running out of money, and out of ambition. As bad as Maxine's agony was in beginning to suspect that their music was no longer relevant, Bonnie's was far worse, knowing that every time she went away from her home, she was trading away precious days she could have been spending with her girls, and with Brownie: days that were priceless and could never be gotten back.

Even Jim Ed was starting to feel some wear and tear; after all his hundreds of conquests, he had met a woman, Helen Cornelius, with whom he was in love. She was a singer, too. It made things a little crowded, a little complicated.

The most constant thing in the world is change. Rare and valuable are the periods in a life when it does not seem to be happening. It is always happening.

They made the decision together. Bonnie had brought it up first, but they all three soon were in agreement: the harder they worked, the more broke they became, and then had to split three ways that which was already not enough. They could never again be as poor as where they had come from, but somehow, after having briefly had a little money, it seemed worse now that it had gone away.

It made no sense to them to be trading away their time for nothing. At one point in their lives it had made sense—they had pursued that path unquestioningly—but now they each just wanted to be in three separate places,
home,
or the three places where they were attempting to build a home.

Even Maxine allowed herself to imagine days of domesticity, providing loving attention to the sustained applause of her needy children.

The Browns simply couldn't hold together anymore. "It's been a good run," Jim Ed told them, the night they committed to the breakup. "It seems like longer than ten years." His own new life opening before him.

"We have to tell Chet," Bonnie said quietly. They were all back home, checking in on Birdie, who had had a dizzy spell and fallen down the steps. She had not hurt anything, but was still dizzy. It was not yet midnight but already she had gone to bed, a thing they could never remember her doing before. They knew she had to wear down at some point, but still it caught them by surprise. They were adults now but they were still her children. Perhaps they thought that with their own strength, as strange and unvanquishable as it was unrequested by them, they could remain in control of that, too; that she would never wear all the way out—would grow old and diminish slowly, but that she would never completely vanish.

Chet never slept; he loved nothing more than to be working in his studio on either side of midnight, and further on, while most of the world was asleep, and when it was so much quieter, and sounds had more space in which to stretch and unfold, flowing around him in currents and waves that at times touched him with such intensity that it seemed he could see them, luminous in the night, and could breathe them, like smoke. He was always working, but he never called it work.

"Let's call him now," Bonnie said, "before we change our minds." She felt relief for herself, but bad for Chet, who would miss them so much.

"We won't change our minds," Jim Ed said, his voice rolling gently through the cabin, so that the words seemed to seep into the logs themselves, penetrating the wood with an authority that would render them into sacred text, with no renegotiation possible after that utterance. They were logs that their father had felled and limbed and milled, in a cabin he had built, and their mother was asleep in the other room, with those same words drifting over her as she slept—and an era was over, their work was done. The greatness was still in them, but their work was done.

Maxine was stunned, could not understand why she was agreeing: as if some larger truth was giving counsel and she was being carried along by it.

Listening to her brother and sister talk, she felt a ringing in her ears, an echo in the stillness. She felt as she did sometimes late at night when she had been drinking.
It won't let me quit but I am going to quit,
she thought, and then, a bit desperately,
I'm going to pretend I'm quitting, but I can't quit. I'll just go along with them, but they don't know what they're talking about. You can't quit something like this.

Chet answered the phone on the first ring. The initial concern in his voice, and then the relief of hearing that everything was all right, and then the relaxation into the pleasure of having them on the line—all of it upset Bonnie. She had to hand the phone to Jim Ed, who calmly explained to Chet that the end had arrived—that they were out of money, and homesick all the time. That they wanted their lives back. That they were grateful to him for all he had done for them, and felt that they were letting him down.

Chet was silent for a moment—he had not been anticipating this—and he held his disappointment to himself, and tried to gather his thoughts, tried to remember that he only wanted what was best for them.

"How's Maxine?" he asked quietly.

Jim Ed looked over at her and paused. "Fine."

"Can I ask you one thing?" Chet said. "One favor?"

"Yes," said Jim Ed, "anything."

"There's this song I've been thinking about that I've been wanting to do," he said. "I think it's perfect, and I can't get it out of my mind. Please," he said, "I'd like to do just one more."

"All right," Jim Ed said, "we'll drive up tomorrow."

"Thank you," Chet said.

The song was called "Mommy, Please Stay Home with Me," an old sentimental Eddy Arnold ballad from the 1940s, about children who are missing their parents. The three Browns were determined to give their all for Chet in this last recording, and the song was so intense for Bonnie and Maxine that what came out was a purer, rawer sound that went all the way past sentimentality and into some further, wilder place, a keening or lamentation, so that even Chet was tearing up, behind the glass.

There was no need for a second take.

The song went to number one in the first week of its release and stayed there for nearly two months. There was just enough money to make work viable for another year. Few leave-takings of immense power are ever clean and final, and the conditions of the going-away cannot be fully controlled: the world does not want to easily release its hold on such contracts on the rare occasions when genius emerges and finds favor in and chooses an individual or individuals to carry it.