Pressing On: The Roni Stoneman Story

22. The Real Thing

K N < E K P $ K N F The Real Thing I was at a bookstore recently and I went “Whoa, wow!” ’Cause there was a book called Big Stone Gap, a novel about a small town in Virginia, by a woman named Adriana Trigiani. And I read some in it and I kept saying “Wow.” ’Cause I know those people in the book. I don’t mean I know those people like I know how it is to be from the mountains and all. I mean I know those actual people! And they turned out to be a big part of my life. Well, there I was, married to George, and living in that nice home. I get a telephone call from George at his work. He was working for the Adult Continuing Education program of the state of Tennessee. After years of not having a job, he finally got one. “Roni, a man called here. Name’s James Smith.” (I’m not using his real name here.) “Wanted you to play in Big Stone Gap for the opening of a new business. I told him you’d do it. He’ll be phoning.” The Real Thing pressing on / 161 Twenty minutes later he did, and I arranged to go. So the time came. I got to the hotel in Big Stone, and I thought, Well, I gotta rest some. I lay there on the bed and I was watching television— Grizzly Adams, that big grizzly bear-man. I was half asleep, and there was a knock on the door: “Miss Stoneman ?” I went to the door and opened it as much as the chain would go, because I looked so bad, I was so tired. A man said, “Would you come down to the room at the end of the hall? Miss Virginia wants to meet you.” “Miss Virginia? Okay. But I gotta fix up some.” I had just bought a salmon-colored dress with fluffy sleeves, a real pretty dress to wear at the show. So I put the dress on and combed my hair and went to the room. That same man opened the door, and he looked at me real funny and said, “C’mon in.” I sat down. There was also another man that he introduced as D. (Again, I don’t want to use his real name.) Sweet little Miss Blue Eyes, Miss Virginia, was laying on the bed, resting with her feet on the covers, the counterpane, as Momma would call it. She had a chaperone with her. I sat at the foot of the bed on a . . . it was like a big chest for you to put quilts in. Well, they started asking me questions. The first one was from Miss Virginia, and she said, uh, “Miss Stoneman . . .” “You can call me Roni.” “Roni . . . how many’s in your family?” “Fifteen.” “Oh, really?” she said, in this odd voice. James laughed. I looked at him. I didn’t know he was James at the time. I just knew he was the guy who had invited me to join them. Then they asked me some more questions. I answered, and every time I said anything, they would laugh. I thought, they’re laughing like I’m lying. Then James said, “Well, I don’t believe that for a minute,” which made it pretty clear. I looked at him and said, “Mister, If you don’t believe anything I tell you, why ask me? I don’t know what kind of friends you’re running with, but it sounds as if you can’t trust anybody , sounds as if you’re hanging with the wrong bunch. You’re asking me questions, I’m telling the truth, and you’re acting like I’m lying.” I walked up to the door, was going to leave. He said, “No, no, we’re sorry, we’re really sorry.” “Don’t ever call me a liar,” I said. “I don’t like it, and I’m not gonna put up with it!” He said, “Please accept my apology.” Told me he was James Smith, brought me back and was more respectful. Then after awhile I got up, said “Bye,” 162 / pressing on and went to my room. I wanted to go to bed early because I had worked so hard at home, getting ready to go. Then there was another knock on the door. Was James Smith again. “Would you like to go to dinner?” he said. “There’s a place down the road, a pizza place.” I got back in the dress. We went down there, and we were having a good time. And after a little he started getting romantic with me. Needless to say, I really enjoyed the attention. I wasn’t used to some man treating me like a reasonable human being. I didn’t know him much, but he didn’t have a wedding band on. And after I told him off about calling me a liar, he seemed to be very very nice. I said that to him. “Do you know why I talked to you like I did in the room there?” he asked. “No, I don’t have any idea.” “Because when I called to hire you, your husband told me that you would do a good show if I could keep you sober. He said that you had a severe drinking problem.” I sat there stunned. I hardly ever drank! “We thought we were gonna get a drunk coming up here,” James said. So James and I were talking and having dinner and I start to get involved with this man. I start to fall in love. He was really courting me that night, and when he took me back to my room, he encouraged me to go further with the situation. I . . . I just couldn’t. Even though I felt really warm and loving and sensuous with him. What was stopping me was my morals. Even though my husband was so abusive and had told James I was a drunk. “What kind of a husband do you have anyway?” he said. “What kind of a man would do that?” So of course I would like being loved and kissed and petted and understood. And then James was a classy man, I thought, a Virginia gentleman. When I said no, he stopped. The next morning, about 7:00, he came knocking at my door again. “Roni, Roni,” he said. And he was really upset and shame-faced. These mountain people do have their ways, and even though he was a successful businessman, he was still a country boy, been raised in an atmosphere of morals and values. pressing on / 163 “Roni . . . my God, I don’t know how to tell you this.” “What is it?” “My wife is at the restaurant. She’s gonna be having breakfast there with D and me and you. She’s come up here ’cause she’s pretty thick with D.” I went, his wife? My God! Now, although there was no ring, I had to admit I had seen a color difference on the skin—I just hadn’t let myself think about it. So this was partly my fault. I can hardly say how I felt. Here I was going down to have breakfast with the woman whose husband I’d been kissing just a few hours before! I got to the restaurant and I had to pretend like nothing was wrong. James sat across the table from me. D sat at the other end. The wife Lureen (again not her real name) was setting there so high and mighty and cocky. Her and D were more than “thick.” But I didn’t know about it then. Then I had to go out and get ready to perform. I was still furious. James was inside his office, taking care of things there. Abluegrass band went on, started doing their show. I came up by the stage and I was looking out in the audience. I like to look at the people. I like to look at them maybe more than they like to look at me. I just love people. The whole shopping place was packed, and over to my right was a beautiful sweet-looking old lady with a cane, wearing those little mountain shoes that lace up. I wasn’t used to that—not in Nashville. Reminded me of my grandmother. (And I was more affected, I guess, because my mother hadn’t long been dead. She died in 1976, after having survived nine heart attacks!) With the woman was this younger guy. It was Mama Griggs and her son, Otto, who’s in this book, Big Stone Gap, though I didn’t know their names at the time (and actually I’ve changed their last name here). I looked at her, and I thought God love her, she’s out there in all this heat and she doesn’t have a chair. So I went inside, got a chair, and brought it out to her. “Here, Mrs. . . .” I said. “My name’s Roni.” “I’m Mama Griggs.” Then when she was thanking me for the chair, she said, “I want you to come up to the house after the show and have dinner with us. We’ll feed you some good food.” That sounded great to me. I wanted to go home with somebody that 164 / pressing on looked like my grandma, up there in the hills—specially now, with the way I was feeling. “Well, thank you,” I said. While I was performing, she would take her cane and beat it on the ground when I’d dance around or whenever I played fancy. She just loved it. After the show I went back to the hotel, and this guy, let’s call him M, who was supposed to be responsible for showing me the town, took me up to the mountain. Mama was up there waiting. For dinner she fed me all kinds of homegrown vegetables and cornbread. Besides Otto, she also had a son named Worley. Worley was about fifty-two years old, never married, just like in the novel. Well there’s stuff in the novel that I won’t talk about (don’t want to spoil it for you), but Worley later told me that stuff wasn’t true—“The lady made that up,” he said. But they are real, Otto and Worley are real. Because I know Otto, and I know Worley, and I knew Mama. (In the novel the Mama character seems to be the mother of someone else.) Mama invited me to come up and stay with her. I didn’t tell her anything about James because I thought he’s got a wife, I’m getting outta this mess. But I moved out of the motel and went up on the mountain to be with her. It wasn’t ’til three days later that James found out where I was at.And then he came up to see me, all the way from another town, about thirty miles away. He had a business in that other town before he opened the new place in Big Stone Gap. “I pretended that I had to be over here for work, Roni, but I really wanted to see you,” he said. “I’m leaving in the morning.” “My God, I didn’t know what in the world happened to you!” And I thought, What did he think would happen to me? “I heard you went off with M,” he said. I knew what he was thinking. M was a single man. And Mama Griggs couldn’t stand M because she said some relative of his had been seen making love to a cow. I said, “You gotta be kidding me!” I think she was. But I wasn’t sure. She did have some strange ideas. She kept a pistol pressing on / 165 under her pillow in the bed—like mountain grannies often did. She’d see a car come up that driveway. “I wonder what that old so-and-so’s comin’ around for,” she’d grumble . “Well . . .” I’d say. “He’s after something.” “Don’t you sell hay? Bales of hay? I betcha that’s what he wants.” “I got my pistol in my pocket.” She’d walk to the door and say, “What can I do for you?” “I come to see about getting some hay.” So then she’d be taking money from him, and she wouldn’t let him inside the door. I would stand there and watch her with her pistol. She was wonderful. I fell in love with James, head over heels. George was always drunk. And the constant abuse. He used to say to me, “You don’t know nothin’. Anybody can just twirl you around three times and push you toward a microphone. That’s all you’re fit for.” And here I was supporting nine people! Even when he was working, he never gave me a cent. So I thought, I’m not really married to that man. That’s somebody I don’t need to be married to. I told him. “George, you don’t love me, and I know it,” I said. “You sure know more than I know.” And then he thought for a minute and said, “Well, you’re right, I don’t.” “Okay, I’m not going to be intimate with you. As long as you drink and take those pills, I’ve got nothing but a drunk lying beside me. I’m getting tired of hearing you grunt and groan all night when you’re high and out of it. I’m just . . . I’m not your wife from now on.” At least I didn’t cheat on him. Just like with Gene, I told him that I was no longer his wife. Then I would go up there and see James. The affair went on for about a year. We’d go places together, like, for instance, the coke burning. That’s when they burn off the extra coke from the coal mines. They do it in huge ditches, and it seems like there’s just miles and miles of fire. It’s a real spectacle. James sent me his credit card, first credit card I ever had in my life! I’d fly into Tri-Cities airport, 166 / pressing on rent a car, and drive on up there and we’d meet and we’d stay together and he’d talk to me, tell me about his situation. I had a beautiful affair with him. The thing about it was he had not been with too many women. He hadn’t been a rounder. He was caring and loving, and sex wasn’t the only thing on his mind. He wanted comforting, understanding, and talking. He made me feel very important to him. The situation he was telling me about wasn’t the best. He truly was hanging with the wrong bunch of people—there were some real shady dealings going on. He’d call me from Virginia and say “Roni, somebody is after me.” But many times I would go up in the mountains of Big Stone not to be with James but to be with Mama Griggs. The Griggs’s place was real primitive. I’d be in the kitchen with Mama, and we’d be fixing food. She had a wood stove and it got real hot in there in the summer. “Mama, it’s awful hot in here!” I’d say. She said, “Yeah, I know it is.” They didn’t have fans or anything. Old Worley would wake me up in the mornings, and he’d knock on the door, bang, bang! I’d leap. “Get in here for your breakfast!” he’d yell. And Mama would just laugh and call from the bedroom we were sharing , “Now, you leave that little thing alone. You just don’t worry about us, we’re having more fun.” Because Mama would start talking about her young days, and it was like a story in itself. She said she used to like to dance, and her husband Wilbur wouldn’t let her. “He was so mean to me,” she said and then she paused a second, this sweet old lady, “so I just said, ‘Fuck him!’” I went Aaaghh and started giggling. When she told these stories, I’d be in old pajamas and an old robe, and we were like mother and daughter in there. I would go to see Mama Griggs to get away from the drinking and the abuse. At first I had a babysitter, but soon the kids were in junior high school and high school, so if I had their clothes all put out in the drawers with their names on them, everything done, then I felt I could leave for two or three days, usually combine it with a time when I was out on the road. Things were good for the kids. They had their own bedrooms. And Becky was very . . . you could depend on Becky. Becky helped me a lot with Barbara and Georgia. At Mama Griggs’s I would often get out early in the morning, and sit pressing on / 167 on the porch and watch the sun come up on the mountain and feel the wet grass under my feet. It was like it was down by Grandma’s house years ago, those summers in the Blue Ridge. I guess I was trying to go back to my girlhood. I gave Mama perfume, Chloe. And I bought her a new stereo so she could hear music, and because she’d want me to dance for her because she couldn’t get out easily. I bought her some of Ralph Stanley’s records, and an album by the group called Chicago, and I’d dance for her every evening. They gave me Wilbur’s change purse and his watch and some gold coins to put in the purse. Mama Griggs said, “I want you to have them.” I knew that, in spite of Wilbur’s meanness, that was the biggest gift they could give me. Wilbur had carried the purse all through the coal mines. When it came time for me to leave, Mama’d cry. I’d say, “Mama, I got a family. I got to go home.” And she’d say, “I know, I know.” But she’d cry so hard. She didn’t have nothing but nails on the wall to hang up her clothes, so when I went away, I’d leave some of my clothes hanging there on a nail, just to make her feel better. Then one day I get a call. From James. George picked it up and he’s drunk, and he’s pilled up, and he starts telling James horrible things about me. I just walked out of the house. I was devastated. And then later on, I went to my minister, Brother Moore, at the Lord’s Chapel. I said, “Brother Moore, I have a problem. I’m involved . . . I’m having . . . kinda having an affair . . . Not kinda . . . I’m having an affair and I’m in love with this married man. I know it’s not right.” I said, “The only way I know to get out of this is to pray it out. Would you pray with me?” “Certainly I will, Roni, of course.” So we prayed. Less than an hour later I get a call from James. “It’s awful!” he said. “You can’t imagine what just happened. I was sitting here at my desk and the blood just squirted out of my nose. You wouldn’t believe how much my nose has bled. I got enough . . . I got enough gauze in my nose to make you a gown.” I’ll never forget him saying that. “Well, James,” I said. “I just got back from the minister’s. I said a prayer that you and I wouldn’t see each other anymore. Because it’s not 168 / pressing on right for you and your family or me and my family. I can’t go along like this. It’s not me. God’s gonna help me to get away from this, help me stop loving you like this.” He was quiet a minute. Then he said, “I understand.” And he never called me again, and that was the end of that story. Except that it took me about two years to be able to drive down a road without crying when I got to thinking about him. And then it also became clear that I was going to have to stop going down to Mama Griggs’s. Worley was always so kind to me, in his way, and I didn’t want things to get out of hand. One day I was helping Mama pop beans. And Worley came in with a copperhead, one of them great big copperheads, wriggling around, doubling over a stick. “Hey, Mama, look what I found up there in the garden patch. Dontcha go up thar now, Ronnni. Dontcha go up thar.” As sweet as he could be. Worley was always trying to help me. He took me out and taught me how to shoot a 38 Smith and Wesson and then gave it to me. He said, “You oughta have this if you’re ridin’ through these here mountains.” I refused it. I never had had a gun in my hand except for the time I dropped one when I was a little girl. It broke my toe into several places, and I ended up with a terrible fever. I treated Worley like I was his sister, and once talked him into getting his teeth fixed so that “maybe all the mountain women’d come hanging around.” Otto was good to me also, showing me all over the farm. They were just real nice. And they knew I was seeing James. But then one time Worley said, “Now where do you want me to put a cabin? I’ll build you any house you want up here.” I didn’t know Worley’s true feelings, whether he thought of me as a sister or something else, but I thought it was time to leave. It was time to get out of Dodge. Mama Griggs would always say to me, “Now, Roni, I don’t want them boys . . . I don’t want one of them takin’ a likin’ to you. And I tole ’em plainly I don’t want ’em ever getting jealous of you. ’Cause I know what it was. I had a husband that wouldn’t let me dance or do anything. And I ain’t gonna have it. D’ya hear? I’m not gonna let them boys . . .” And I said, “I know, Mama, I know. Everything’s fine, everything’s fine. We’ll handle it.” Because I certainly wasn’t going to get involved or hurt them. She was absolutely right. I just left and I never went back, though pressing on / 169 I have had some nice phone conversations with the boys over the years. Mama has since died. I never talked to James anymore, but my affair with him was one of the most wonderful things that ever happened to me. It sounds kind of dumb, like, well, Roni Stoneman, there she goes, in love again, the romantic of the world, dumb dumb. But it was the real thing. I think that there are some times in life that something is real for you in your emotions, but it can’t work in real life because there’s other people you gotta think about. But in its way it was so real and wonderful. And my time at Mama and Otto and Worley’s house was also real and wonderful. It was pure peace. ...