The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

THE FINAL VERSE Chet Williamson

Okay, this on? Yep, red light, guess I’m good to go. I carry this thing around in case I get any song ideas, never used more than the first few minutes of a tape, so this’ll be a first. What I’m gonna do now is tell how I came to get the last verse of “Mother Come Quickly,” and also what really became of Pete Waitkus. Then I’m gonna tuck this away in my safe-deposit box, and maybe someday everybody’ll know the real story. So here goes.

Now you oughta know this anyway, but “Mother Come Quickly” is one of the best-known songs in popular music, a sure-fire classic. It’s traditional, and because of that everybody and his brother’s recorded it. It was around as a folk song for a good many years before it was really a hit, which was when Peter, Paul, and Mary put it on their first album. It was that year’s “Tom Dooley.” Joan Baez did it on one of her first records, Bob Dylan used just the tune and put his own lyrics to it. There’s even been rock versions of it. Kurt Cobain did it on that “Unplugged” show, lotsa others. And country and bluegrass, hell yes. Doesn’t matter it’s really a woman’s song, a lot of guys sung it — Johnny Cash, George Jones, even ole Hank did it live, but he never recorded it. Became a bluegrass standard after Bill Monroe brought it out on Decca in the fifties. The Stanleys, Jim and Jesse, hell, even I did it back when I was doing straight country.

Course, I’m bluegrass now — then and now, since I started out as one of Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys, playing rhythm guitar and singing lead for two months way back in the early seventies till Bill realized that good as my singing was I wasn’t never gonna get that Lester Flatt lick, that bum-bumma-dooba-dooba-do that had become such a part of his sound. I could play it medium tempo, but real fast I hit it maybe two times out of five, and the other three it sounded like chickens dancing on the frets. He let me go, but not before one of them Nashville smoothies seen me and thought I had the voice and looks to make the big time.

He was right. In a few years I was just holding the damn guitar, letting the backup pickers play the tricky licks. Yeah, I had a shitload of songs on the charts back then — and I did “Mother Come Quickly” on my album, Billy Lincoln Sings Songs from the Home Place. That was around 1983, when I was starting to slip. Record sales were down, they weren’t asking me on the Grand Ole Opry anymore, concerts weren’t selling, and Columbia dropped me.

So I went back to bluegrass. Any port in a storm, and things had gotten pretty damn stormy by then. I’d spent a lot more than I’d saved, and what I had saved I’d put into dumbass investments. I played guitar with Doyle Lawson for a time, doing the festival and church circuit, and finally started my own group, Billy Lincoln and the Blue Mountaineers. We did okay, got a contract with Rounder, where a lot of the best bluegrass acts were, and sold enough CDs to hang on.

We did “Mother Come Quickly,” not like the ballad version the folkies did, but more up-tempo, driving bluegrass, the way Monroe did it. In fact, let me do it now, just so you can hear what the song was like for the first seventy or so years, before the last part… came along, so to speak. I’ll do it like a ballad, because I want the words to stick out, and because that’s how I’m gonna do it tomorrow night.…

Now that’s the first verse and the chorus, so right off the bat you know something bad’s gonna happen. It goes on…

So now you got your paternal opposition, and right away you know the kids are gonna get into this, because whatever their parents want, hell, they want the opposite too. But now weird shit starts happening…

Okay, now we got a dead girl in the picture, and she’s stabbed by this gal’s lover’s knife. Only he didn’t do it. She says he was not guilty of the crime. I always thought maybe he told her he didn’t and she believed him, or maybe she knew some other way. Still, guilty or not, she wants him to get out of there, because she loves him, she doesn’t want to see him hang…

…and blah blah blah, final chorus. Up till now. She loved this fella, her dad didn’t approve, so maybe Dad framed him with his knife and got him hung, and the girl feels guilty about it. But you notice something? The last verse only has four lines, not like the other ones that have eight.

That’s where the rumor got started that there was more to the song than what everybody knew. When it got hot with the folkies in the early sixties was when the rumor really started growing. There was this story that A. P. Carter of the Carter Family had found the whole thing but wouldn’t sing it, and some folks claimed they’d heard Mother Maybelle confirm it, but I think that’s bullshit. But Roger Waitkus — that’s the old guy who first collected it way long ago — he never said nothing. Never even said where he got it other than that it was Appalachian traditional or some such.

Waitkus was a queer duck. He was the biggest rival to John and Alan Lomax as far as collecting songs, but he didn’t go out of the country or out west and down to the Delta like the Lomaxes did. He just did the mountains — the Appalachians and the Ozarks, that whole Scotch-Irish-English tradition, looking for every variant he could find, and of course anything new that hadn’t popped up before.

He started way back in the twenties and thirties, and had his own little dynasty too — his son Carl was doing stuff around the same time as Alan Lomax, and then there’s… his grandson Peter. I met Pete when he was a little kid, and I always got along good with him. He had a bad case of hero worship for me, because, hell, there I was, little older than a kid myself, playing on stage with the father of bluegrass. I kind of took to Pete, he knew so damn much for a kid. We lost track of each other when I went country, though I got Christmas cards from him, and I’d always write him back.

It sort of meant something, getting cards from him, because to most folk he was real standoffish, like his old man and his grandpa had been. They did what they did, and published a book from some little college press every few years. I never knew a thing about Roger or Carl’s wives, though they must’ve had them. But Pete thought of me as a friend because we’d been friendly when we both were much younger.

When I went back to bluegrass, it was like I’d been born again to Pete. He came to a lot of my gigs and was plumb tickled when I got my own band. He’d give me songs he’d come across and thought might work for me, and I used a few, gave him a nod on the CD credits, or when we performed I’d say, “That song was give to me by a good old friend, Pete Waitkus,” and he’d like that. He was still digging in the mountains for songs the way his daddy and grandpa did — they were both dead now — and he spent a lot of time going over the old tapes and discs and wire recordings they made, seeing what might’ve been overlooked.

Anyway, he calls me last spring and says he wants to see me. He’s all excited, and he says, “Billy, I think I found a key to the Holy Grail.” Well, I’ve seen that Indiana Jones movie, and I don’t know if he’s joking or what, but I say okay, come on over. He lives in Nashville too, so he’s there pretty quick.

It’s quiet at my house since Linda’s gone. She left right after Christmas, but we’ve been keeping it mum. Bluegrass fans don’t like it if you got family troubles, and she’s still singing in the act with her mom and brothers, so we figure we’ll just play it cool before we get an actual separation or divorce.

Pete doesn’t want a beer or coffee or anything, he’s that excited. He can’t even sit down, and he’s up and walking around, and says he’s got the best clue ever about the rest of the “Mother Come Quickly” song. Hell, I figure if anybody would he would, since it’s his grandpa that found it, but I nod like this is great news. Then he starts rattling on.

“Do you know the story of how my grandpa got that song?” he asks, and I tell him I heard it was some old lady sang it for him. “That’s right,” he says, “it was Bertha Echols. She was old back then, and she told him there was more, but it wasn’t hers to sing. That’s all I knew, until.…”

And he takes this big old pause like he’s waiting for a drumbeat, and I say, “Until what?”

And then he says he found the original aluminum disc Roger Waitkus made back in nineteen-thirty-something. “I heard the tape transcriptions dozens of times,” Pete says, “but there was more on the disc.”

“More of the song?” I asked. I’m getting a little excited now myself.

“No,” he says, “just talk. I put it on a DAT. You got a machine?”

Of course I got a DAT, so he sticks it in there and I hear his grandpa’s voice, and it’s saying, close as I can recall, “Now, Mrs. Echols, it’s very important that you sing the entire song for me. This is an important historical document,” and he’s going on like that for a while, really pressing this woman, and then it gets to back and forth.

He says, “Well, why can’t you sing it for me?”

And she says, “It ain’t mine to sing.”

And he says, “Well, whose is it?”

And she says, “The family. Ask them.”

And he says, “What family?”

And she says, “You know.”

And he says, “No I don’t.”

And she says, “Yes you do, and that’s all I’m a-sayin’.”

And she says nothing and he says nothing and then Pete stops the tape. And I say, “That’s clear as mud.”

“No, she was right,” Pete says. “My grandpa knew it but he didn’t realize it. She’d sung it for him. The answer was right there in the lyrics.” And Pete tells me to listen, and he rewinds the tape and plays the beginning:

I come from a lovin’ family

That lives where the two creeks meet.

At least that’s what I hear. It’s tough, because the old lady is singing kind of screechy, and the recording is crap, all full of hiss and other junk.

Pete turns it off and asks me what she sang. I tell him what I heard and he shakes his head no. “She didn’t say ‘a lovin’,’ ” he says. “You heard her dialect, she’d have pronounced it ‘luhvin,’ but instead she sings almost a long ‘o’ like ‘loavin.’ And listen to the word before too.”

So he plays it again, and damned if it doesn’t sound like “loavin,” and in front of what I thought was “a” I can just barely hear, over all the noise, a t-h sound.

“What did you hear?” Pete asks.

“The loavin’ family?” I say, feeling stupid. “What the hell’s that, folks that make loaves of bread?”

“The L-O-V–I-N family,” he spells out. “Spelled like lovin’, but pronounced ‘loavin.’ It’s a name. Not a common one in the Appalachians, but a real one. Louvin is another version of it, like the Louvin Brothers?”

I nod my head. I’ve met Charlie Louvin — mighty nice man, though I hear his brother Ira was mean as a gutshot snake.

Then Pete tells me he’s gone online and checked the records for the county where Bertha Echols lived, and there was a Lovin family who lived there around 1935, when Roger Waitkus made that recording, but Pete couldn’t find anything about them after that.

So I asked him, “What are you sayin’? That this family’s got the last verse to the song?”

“Why not?” he says. “That stuff gets handed down, and after all, it’s their song. If anybody’d have it, one of the Lovins would.”

So I ask if he can’t find any modern records about them, what makes him think there’s still any Lovins left. And he says there’s still places up in the mountains where the census takers don’t even go, still folks who don’t pay taxes or social security, still people the government don’t even know exist, and if they do, they couldn’t care less, since they don’t have any money to pay taxes anyway.

Well, it all sounds kind of dubious to me, and he can see it in my face, but then he starts pitching me. “Think about it, Billy,” he says. “Think about the singer who introduces that last verse to the public. Think about TV appearances, think about record sales. Boy, this is the closest anybody’s ever come to finding this verse — and maybe the real story of the Lovins beside. I always liked you, always liked your singing, always liked your company… so why don’t you come with me?”

I thought maybe there was more to it than that. Pete’s sort of a pip-squeak, and I figured he didn’t like the thought of going up into those mountains alone. Me, I’m a pretty big guy, and I got a nice collection of pistols, which is two good reasons for wanting me to come along. It was probably a wild-goose chase, but hell, I didn’t have to start touring for another two weeks, and if we did find that verse, well, he was right about the publicity, and I could use it. If you ain’t been in O Brother, Where Art Thou? bluegrass is still the poor cousin in the music business.

So I say sure and Pete says great, but don’t tell a soul. He doesn’t want anybody else knowing about this, which is fine with me.

Next day, six o’clock in the morning, God help me, I drive my car over to his place, park it in his garage, and we go off in his RV. It’s a nice one, with a toilet and big bunks, just in case we got to spend a night or two someplace where there are no motels. Pete lives alone too, so nobody knows what we’re doing except us.

We drive east about four hours into North Carolina, just stopping once to take a leak and get some Krispy Kremes, then up into the Smokies, and we go to this town where Bertha Echols lived. I stay in the RV, behind the tinted windows, and let Pete talk to the people, because they might recognize me and we’re keeping a low profile. He checks first at the post office, this little building not much bigger than an outhouse, but they tell him there’s no such family living around there.

So he comes back and tells me this, and says he’s gonna poke around town and I say fine, so I read some magazines while he’s poking. Around one o’clock he comes back and says he’s talked to dang near every old fart in the village, and nobody knows a thing. Never heard of no Lovins around here, they say. Closest Pete gets to anything is one old black man who says there used to be Lovins living years ago way up in the hills. The old place might be there, but nobody’d be alive now.

That’s good enough for Pete. I tell him that if there’s nobody alive up there then there’s nobody to sing any damn songs, but he’s like a kid in a candy store. He pulls out these, whaddyacallem, topographical maps with all the mountains and streams on them, and starts looking, and I ask what he’s looking for, and he says, “Like in the song—‘I come from the Lovin family that lives where the two creeks meet.’”

“Jesus,” I say, “where the hell don’t two creeks meet?” But he kept looking and narrowed it down to four places he thought there could be a cabin. I said, “Pete, look at all those streams and creeks up there, and all the places they meet! Must be a hundred. How can you say these four are the right ones?” Well, he mumbled something about “cultural geography” or some such B.S., and I thought, hell, it’s his dime.

So we start up into the mountains and it isn’t long before we’re on dirt roads, and with the dirt roads come the ruts and the limbs fallen down over the road, and since I’m the big guy and Pete’s driving, I’m the one got to get out and move them. Even with the crappy roads, it’s pretty up there. Spring’s come, and the trees are greening and there are wildflowers all over. We see a few deer now and again, some rabbits, birds taking dust baths in the dirt, and none of them seem very scared of us, almost like it’s annoying that they got to get out of the road.

We get near this one place, so we park and walk through the woods — Pete’s got himself a compass — and soon we find a place where two creeks meet. I see now what Pete meant. There’s a little open area at the base of a bluff, a good place for a cabin, but there isn’t one there, not even a foundation, so we go back and drive on.

Next place it’s the same thing. Pretty site, but nothing there. It’s getting kind of late now, and I tell Pete we oughta head back, but he says just one more. So we go another ten or so windy miles of rotten road. At least this site’s closer to where we park, about a hundred yards through the trees. And son of a bitch if we don’t see a cabin there, nestled right sweet in this little hollow, just like a cover painting on one of those Songs of the Mountains CDs. A few outbuildings are near fallen down, and next to one of them is a pole about eight foot long and six foot in the air, its ends stuck in the forks of two trees, and I think all it needs is a swing hanging from it.

Only thing is, nobody’s been swinging there in years, far as I can see. The cabin’s door is wide open, and most all the glass has fell out of the windows. The chinking between the logs is out in a lot of places too, so you can look right inside between the cracks.

Still, Pete’s jumping around like he found King Tut’s tomb or something. He goes to the door and actually says, “Hello?” like somebody’s gonna answer him, like the whole Lovin clan is just gonna come out on the porch with banjos and guitars and mandolins and sing him their song.

“Nobody here, Pete,” I say. “Nobody been here for a good number of years.” I push on past him and go inside. It’s a shit pile. Everything’s dusty and smells old and moldy. There’s still some furniture, awful worse for wear, a big old square table with five spindly wooden chairs, all of them homemade, but not good homemade, not like antiques. More like crap wood just thrown together with cheap nails. There are another couple chairs, just as ugly, by a fireplace. There’s an old iron cookstove, there’s a cupboard the shelves have all fell out of, and there’s what’s left of a rope bed at the back of the room, ropes all tore and hanging down. I see a torn cord and what’s left of a cloth curtain on the floor that might’ve made the bedroom a little more private.

There’s a ladder along the side wall that goes up into the attic, and I figure kids must’ve slept up there, but the wood’s all dry and rotten, so I’m not gonna risk it. “So,” I say to Pete, “you think this is the Lovin mansion?”

He nods, like it’s the greatest place he’s ever seen. “Sure of it,” he says, and he heads for the ladder.

“Whoa, hoss,” I tell him. “That don’t look any too safe to me. Besides, it’s gettin’ dark. Let’s wait till morning to look for the hidden gold, okay?”

“You mean it?” he says. “We can stay here tonight?”

“Not here,” I say, “but in the RV, sure. You brought stuff to cook, right?” Because by now I’m getting real hungry.

He says he did, so we go back to the RV, and it is getting dark, and we trip over some roots but we make it okay. Pete’s got some burgers in the fridge that we fry up, and we have a couple of beers. I try to calm him down a little, tell him that even if this is the old Lovin place, we ain’t gonna find shit, but he doesn’t seem to care.

After we eat, he asks me if I’d sing the song for him, what there is of it, and he’s got a little Martin Backpacker guitar, so I do, and he sits there grinning like a kid. I sing a few more songs, but I’m feeling pretty tired after getting up so early, so we open the RV windows, since it’s a little stuffy, and crawl into our bunks and turn off the lights. It’s dark and quiet, just the sound of bugs chirping, and I fall asleep as quick as that.

When I wake up it’s still dark, and at first I think what I hear is an animal yowling, like a cat in heat. But as I get more awake I realize it’s a human voice, and it’s singing, and it’s just awful, God, like nails on a chalkboard. I sit up and listen, and damned if I can’t make out “‘who wooed me with words so sweet.’”

I get out of the bunk and call Pete’s name, but there’s no answer. I feel around his bunk, but he’s not there. Well, I don’t know what the hell is going on, so I grab a flashlight from where I saw Pete put one, and I turn it on and open the little case I brought along and I get out a.38 revolver I’d brought and I shove it down the front of my pants, reminding myself not to blow my balls off.

That might seem a little extreme, but we’re out there in the middle of nowhere and Pete’s gone, and I don’t know who the hell else is up in these hills. So I go outside and I don’t need the light, because the full moon’s come up over the horizon and it’s plenty bright to see where I’m walking, even with all the trees around.

I get closer to the cabin and see there’s lights on inside. The voice is still singing — it’s up to the part now where they find the dead girl by the creek, and that voice is so weird I gotta look down at the creek to make sure there isn’t a body lying there. Funny thing — even though I got closer to the cabin, the voice didn’t seem to get any louder. It was like I was hearing it inside myself, like distance didn’t have anything to do with it.

When I got to the cabin I didn’t go in the door, but went around to the window instead and just raised my head up over the bottom of the sill. I damn near pissed myself. Pete was in there sitting on that dirty floor, in all the dust and the mouse turds, and sitting right next to him was the ugliest old woman I’ve ever seen. I don’t have much of a gift for words outside of songs, but believe you me, I wouldn’t write any kind of song about that woman. She was like somebody dug her up and barely squirted some juice into her old dry skin. Her hair was dirty gray-yellow, like week-old snow in the gutter, and her eyes were these little black beads that honed into Pete like a hawk on a baby rabbit. There were more lines on her face than there were on Pete’s maps. How ugly was she? Think of the worst thing you can and go a hundred more miles. Then keep driving.

After that first glimpse, I shot my head back down again. Christ knows I didn’t want her looking at me the way she was at Pete. There were plenty of chinks in the wall, and I found one to look through. I felt safer then, though I really didn’t know why that old woman scared me so much. I’d find out. I saw that the light in the cabin was from a few candles, but everything else was the same, and I wondered where the hell that old woman had been keeping herself — up in the attic maybe, or could be there was a cellar with a trapdoor we hadn’t noticed.

By then she was singing the fourth verse, that short one about the gal feeling guilty, and then the chorus. When she stopped, Pete said, “My God, that was beautiful. I’ve heard that song sung hundreds of times, but never like that.”

I thought maybe he was putting her on, because I’d never heard it sung like that neither. But he sounded sincere as could be, and he told her that her voice sounded wonderful. I could see him looking at her like she was an angel, and I wondered what the hell was wrong with him. And then he answered my question for me, or at least I thought.

“Would you sing me the rest?” he says. Bingo, I think to myself—that’s why he’s being so sweet to her. He thinks she’s a Lovin. He’s after the goddam song, that’s all, and if it means telling a crazy old lady she looks like an angel and sings like a bird, old Pete’ll be taping feathers to her arms if he has to.

The old woman doesn’t say a thing at first. She just touches his face with those fingers like old bent twigs, and I wonder how Pete keeps from shuddering. Then she leans in that wrinkled old road map of a face and whispers something in his ear. I can’t hear the words, but it sounds like paper scraping on a two-day growth of beard.

Then Pete nods and be damn if he doesn’t touch her face, lets his fingers trail down her cheek and move over to her lips and then, Jesus Harvey Christ, he kisses her. And I don’t mean like you kiss your grandma. He lays it right on her, open mouthed, and I see something kind of fat and black that I think is maybe her tongue, and man, that’s all I want to see. I look down and take a few deep breaths, thinking about the lengths that people will go to to get what they want, and hoping I never get that desperate.

After I don’t know how long, I look back up, and now, good God, it’s even worse. I mean, he’s doin’ her, right there on the floor. They got their clothes off and he’s on top of her, and I never saw anything like that in my life, it looked like he was trying to screw that thing in the basement in those Evil Dead movies. I near to puked, and I looked away again but I still heard them, Pete panting like he was, I don’t know, in the throes of ecstasy, and that old woman just grunting like a pig, louder and louder till it seemed like something busted inside her, and she let out this howl like some crazy monkey with its tail on fire.

It got quiet then, and I looked through the chink. They were both lying there, and it wasn’t pretty, and I started thinking about what an absolute whore Pete Waitkus was, and I’da bet dollars to donuts that Alan Lomax never would’ve done nothing like that for a lousy song.

It was almost like Pete heard me thinking, bringing him back to square one, because he said, “Now… now will you sing for me?”

And she did. She started with that shortened fourth verse, and I’m not gonna try and sound like her because there’s no way, but it was all high and airy, not as screechy as before, but just plain spooky…

She paused for a second, and I thought, oh shit, that’s all. She screwed Pete twice tonight. But then she went on, and it was the money shot…

Damn me, yes. We were getting there, all right. Nobody’d ever heard that one before. She started on the chorus…

Then I heard a rustling, shuffling kind of sound that seemed to be outside with me, and when I turned my head I froze. Up toward the front of the cabin there were some people walking. I counted four shapes in the moonlight, one after another. They were moving slow, but like they knew where they were headed.…

The two shorter ones had on long skirts, and the two tall ones were wearing pants, so I figured two men and two women, but when they went through the door and I saw them in the candlelight, they could’ve been anything. What was left of their hair was long and straggly, and if the old woman on the floor was a little long in the tooth, then these four had already had the worms at them. And that’s not just a figure of speech.

Then the old woman says, “It’s time for the last verse,” and she puts on her dress, thank God, pulls it over her head as fast as a young woman might, and quick gets on her feet while the others surround Pete, who’s still naked.

The two in pants reach down and grab him, one by his legs and the other by his arms, and pick him up like a baby. They go outside with him, moving fast now, toward that pole in the forks of two trees that I thought was the frame for a swing. The one man drops the top half of Pete’s body and the other one hauls up on the legs so he’s got Pete’s feet up in the air, one on either side of the pole. Then one of the women sticks Pete through the back of both ankles — Jesus, did he squeal — with a long wooden stake sharpened on both ends, and before I can shut my jaw, they got him hanging head-down from the pole, and I realize that it ain’t no swing. It’s a pole for slaughtering hogs.

I fumbled for the gun in my pants and started to pull it out, but it got caught, and before I could free it, the old woman started to sing again. It was the last verse. Oh Jesus, was it ever, and now her voice sounded almost sweet. And this is what she sang…

Then one of the men cut Pete’s throat.

I knew it was too late, my hand on the gun slumped. The blood just poured out of him, and one of the women caught it in a wooden bowl. He kept moving for a while, but he was dead. I couldn’t have saved him. I keep telling myself that, and I hope it’s the truth.

Then they did what she said they’d do in the song. And I could only crouch there in the shadows and watch, afraid to move, praying the moon wouldn’t light me up. Hell, I didn’t know what they were, I didn’t know if I even could shoot them, if it’d do any good. It wouldn’t do Pete any good, that was for sure.

After they got done with Pete — taking what they wanted from him — they went into the cabin, and they ate and drank like the song said, and I was still too scared to move, to make a sound. But after a while the sounds inside the cabin, like pigs eating from a trough, they stopped, and it got quiet, and it was darker too. I’d just started to move when I heard the old woman’s voice — at least I think it was hers. It sounded different, soft but… stronger. It was singing.

It was singing a final chorus, a chorus that maybe nobody outside this hollow had ever heard.

When it was finished, I looked into the cabin through the chinks. All the candles but one had burned out. The Lovins, all five of them, were lying on the floor, like hogs that had eaten their fill and fallen asleep.

I stood up and took a step away from the cabin, and my foot lit right on a dry branch that snapped loud as a breaking bone. I held still. I could feel sweat just oozing out of me. I waited for footsteps crossing the cabin floor to the door, but they didn’t come.

So I got a little braver and looked in through the window. None of them were moving at all. It was like they were dead drunk. And then I knew what I had to do.

I thought about it as I picked my way through the trees toward the RV. Whatever these things were, they were evil. I didn’t know if they’d magicked Pete or what, but my folks are from the hills, and my grandpas and grandmas and aunts and uncles told me things that people would say were crazy, but which they really believed in. They saw things happen with their own eyes that we’d say were impossible. And I saw something tonight that made no sense at all in the real world. At the very best, these… people were murderers. Pete was dead, and they’d killed him. And worse.

I’d seen the two-gallon can of gas in the back of the RV, so I took it and a pack of matches and went back to the cabin. It was still dark but for the moon, and I finally looked at my watch. Two thirty-five. There was plenty night left — too much of it.

It took me some nerve to go inside, but I did. The Lovins weren’t moving. Hell, they didn’t even seem to be breathing now. The last candle was burnt out, but the moon gave me just enough light to work. I slopped the gas all up the dry wood walls and over the floor. I didn’t splash any on the Lovins, though, just in case they might wake up, but they didn’t. The tallest man, who I took to be the father, was lying in a patch of moonlight, and he wasn’t what he’d been before. His hair was full and long and dark, except for gray at the temples, and his skin was whole again.

That was enough. I didn’t want to look at the others.

I poured a trail of gas out through the front door and then touched a match to it. It ran inside quick as a snake and the whole shebang went up at once. That dry wood took to fire like kindling, and in less than a minute the cabin was blazing. Nothing moved inside. I don’t think even the burning woke them up.

The hollow was pretty well hid, so I doubted anybody’d see the flames, and there was enough of a clearing around the cabin that I didn’t think it’d set the woods on fire, though I didn’t give a damn if it did or not. I wasn’t thinking real clear.

But clear enough to haul down what was left of Pete. I found an old shovel in an outbuilding and buried him away from the cabin, back in the woods. It would’ve been quicker to toss him in the fire, but I didn’t want him with them. Not any more than he was.

I said some words over him, climbed in the RV, and drove through the dark back toward Nashville. I got lost a couple times on those dirt roads, but finally hit a blacktop and got my bearings. Back at Pete’s I put the RV in his driveway and pulled my car out of his garage without anybody seeing me, and drove home.

I had the song with me. I had it in my head. And by God, I was gonna do something with it. I couldn’t tell the truth about how I got it, so I figured I pull that journalistic thing and say I couldn’t reveal my sources. If people don’t believe me, the hell with them. One thing in my favor is that it makes something terrible out of a song everybody loves, and if I’d made it up on my own, I sure wouldn’t have done that.

I kept Pete’s DAT copy of Bertha Echols and played it again and heard something else different. That line about “You are a lovin’ daughter/My father said to me/But before you wed I’ll see him dead…” That wasn’t transcribed right either. Bertha Echols sings it “You are the Lovin daughter” and not “but”—“So before you wed I’ll see him dead,” like one thing follows the other, and for the Lovins it did.

Once I had all the lyrics in my head, I told my manager about it and he got to work. Boy, did he ever. I’m recording it next week, and Sony’s already offered to buy out my Rounder contract. I’m getting a full hour with Terry Gross on National Public Radio, twenty minutes with Larry King, I’m booked on Prairie Home Companion, but we’re actually gonna spring the song on 60 Minutes. I get the final segment, and they’re flying to Nashville and broadcasting me live singing it for the first time. A straight ahead ballad with guitar, no banjos or bluegrass from now on. Oh no, I’m looking to get back into country, where the money is.

Hell, I can wear a cowboy hat as well as the next guy, and lose a few pounds around my middle, too. Besides, the country crowd aren’t as tough on you as those tightass bluegrass folks if you wanta split from your wife and remarry — or hell, maybe just be a swinger again.

Since Linda left, my love life’s been drier than a west Texas August, but it looks like my luck might be changing. Met a real honey in the Station Inn a few nights ago. Incredible. A ten. Eyes to drown in, sweetest voice you ever did hear, and we been goin’ out every night since. Kinda surprised me she’d be rubbin’ up on a guy my age, but maybe she’s got one of those daddy complexes you hear about. I know she’s got her sights set on this old songbird, because she says she wants to take me home tonight to meet her kin. What the hell, maybe her mama can cook.

A certain chubby mandolin player made a crack about the “old hag” I was with — I knew that boy’s eyesight was bad from the diabetes and the booze, but not that much. He must be near blind as a bat. Or just jealous. Can’t blame him, I guess. It’s pretty damn amazing that a girl like her is sweet on a guy like me. Yep, my luck’s just runnin’ good for a change.

That’s about it, I guess. Tomorrow’s 60 Minutes, and I get famous again. I have to confess, though, I guess my conscience is bothering me a little — not over what I did up there in the mountains, but about whether I should do it or not, you know, take a song that people have loved their whole lives and turn it into something else, something… ugly. But hey, you can’t buy this kind of publicity. If I hadn’t have gotten it, maybe somebody else might’ve. And the money’ll be nice — I got the copyright, and whoever covers it — and there’ll be plenty in years to come — will have to pay old Billy Lincoln.

Yeah, like I say, the luck’s runnin’ good as a spring stream.

But I never did play that last chorus, did I? The last one I heard the old lady sing. Well, okay then, here we go, just in case I get hit by a meteor or struck by lightning before tomorrow night…

Sweet.