Elmo kept his mouth shut about who owned the still. He knew his family would be cared for, and his crop would be waiting when he got out, because even if he was tighter than Dick’s hatband, Lee Calhoun took care of his own, unless they did some dumb thing like talking to the federals. In January of ’35 he left in chains for the federal prison in New Orleans, sentenced to a year but knowing he would be home in six months. Other men had books or prayer to pass the days, but he just sang. “Daddy told Mama it was ‘nice,’ and said he got three good meals a day,” Jerry Lee says, and in truth the prison turnips and the beets and white beans flavored with salt pork were better than what a lot of families were subsisting on.
In late spring, he came home to Ferriday more or less untouched and unchanged, at least as far as anybody could tell, and well fed. He went back to work in the fields, but not in the woods at the still; the federals had warned him that if he was caught making or even hauling liquor again, he would do real time. At night, he showed his namesake how to play his old guitar. The three of them, Mamie and her Elmos, would pretend they were on the radio, like the Carter family, to remind themselves that short cotton and chain gangs and a rising river were not all there was. She was expecting again, and the new baby kicked Mamie hard and often.
The state was in mourning as Mamie neared her time. On September 8, 1935, Huey Long had strutted down the hallway of his capitol, intent on pushing through a redistricting plan that would remove from the bench a longtime political enemy, Judge Benjamin Pavy. The judge’s son-in-law, a young doctor named Carl Weiss, stepped from the crowd of onlookers and fired a single shot into Long’s body; his bodyguards fired sixty-two rounds into Weiss, most of them after he was dead. Long, the friend of the little man, was laid out in a tuxedo, and two hundred thousand people filed by to see him in repose. One great storm in Louisiana had finally blown itself out; another one, at Turtle Lake, was just beginning.
The new baby came twenty-one days later, on September 29, 1935, after the last of the cotton was in. “Dr. Sebastian was supposed to deliver me,” says Jerry Lee, who has heard so many stories of the night of his birthing that it is as if he was up there in the rafters himself, looking down. “At least, he was supposed to. . . . Well, he did make it into the house.”
Mamie knew something was horribly wrong that night. The pain was awful, worse, much worse, than she remembered. Elmo went for the doctor, and she prayed.
Dr. Sebastian and Elmo could hear her wail as they neared the house.
“Thank God,” Mamie said, as they came into the room.
Dr. Sebastian told her to hush, it wasn’t time yet, but to Mamie he seemed a little unsteady on his feet. The doctor had been at home, relaxing with a drink or two.
Elmo offered him a drink of corn whiskey, to be polite. Dr. Sebastian looked at the clear whiskey the way a scientist could. He examined it for trash, and there was none, and for color. It looked like spring water. This was good whiskey. He unscrewed the lid—it smelled strong and rank and hard, which was also the way corn whiskey was supposed to behave—and took one long, slow, big slash, to be polite, and then another.
Sometime later, when she knew it was time, Mamie cried out for them, but found only Elmo at her side.
“Where’s Dr. Sebastian?” Mamie croaked.
“Over there,” Elmo said.
“What?”
“He’s a-layin’ over there,” Elmo said, and pointed across the room.
Dr. Sebastian was asleep in a chair. “Wake him up,” Mamie said.
Elmo had tried that.
Dr. Sebastian dreamed.
“I can handle this,” he told Mamie.
Of course the child would not be born in the usual way. The baby was breached, turned in the womb, and emerged not head-but feetfirst. Elmo did not really understand the perils of that, but Mamie did. Babies strangled this way, died horribly or were damaged for life, and mothers died in agony.
Elmo took hold of the baby’s feet and pulled.
“Watch his arm,” Mamie said, iron back in her jaw.
Elmo nodded.
“Watch his head,” she said, and did not remember much after that.
“Daddy brought me right out,” he says now. “I come out jumpin’, an’ I been jumpin’ ever since.” He likes to say that, likes the idea of it, as he likes the idea that it was his daddy and mama who brought him into the world without help from outsiders: one more little legend inside the larger one. It was a time rich in babies, and in legends. Over in Tupelo, that January, another poor woman gave birth to a son she named Elvis. In Ferriday, in March, Minnie Bell Swaggart, who had rescued her husband from the prison truck, gave birth to her son, Jimmy. Another of the extended family, Edna Gilley, soon gave birth to another cousin, whom she named Mickey. All of them came in the span of two years, all of them somehow anointed, all of them destined to sing songs and bring their gifts to the multitudes in one way or another, with great success but varying degrees of cost.
Mamie and Elmo named their second son for an actor Mamie sort of remembered, some Jerry-something, and for Lee Calhoun, whose whiskey turned out the lights on Dr. Sebastian, and perhaps a little bit for his grandfather, Leroy Lewis, though family members would argue on whom the boy was named for exactly. It was, regardless, the happiest time of their lives, and it would have stayed that way, if time could have only gone slack, somehow, right then, and pooled deep and still.
2
WHISKEY IN THE DITCHES TWO FEET DEEP
Concordia Parish
1938
The serpents balled up in the hot dark over his bed, a whole nest of them tying and untying in knots, scraping quietly across the boards of the attic, eighteen in all. Their rattles sang, but the boy never heard. Odd, how he never heard. But Scripture tells of the slyness of serpents; in the Pentecostal South they slide not only through the still water but across faith and myth. Old men hung serpents on barbed wire to bring the rains, and would not look a serpent in its eyes for fear of being charmed. In the fields of Concordia Parish, old women told of serpents that formed a circle and rolled like a wheel, and re-formed if they were chopped in two. But myth is myth and Scripture is the Word of God, and it tells over and over of the serpents’ duplicity and evil and jealousy, in Eden, Egypt, and Canaan, after God reduced it to a thing that crawled on its belly, and decreed, in Isaiah, that dust shall be the serpent’s meat. The story of the serpents above little Jerry Lee’s bed has endured for seventy years and will endure long after this, as people tell how the rising waters lifted the copperheads and diamondbacks into trees, barn lofts, and rafters. They talk of how surely the serpents would have come down in the night and coiled in the dark corners and under beds if the boy, in his covers, had not seen a big rattler slide through a knothole in the boards above his head, “stuck his head down, and looked right at me” in the dim lamplight in his room.
“This ain’t your bed,” the boy called up to it.
The snake hung there, a few feet from his face.
“Daddy,” the boy said, quietly.
“Daddy!”
But Scripture says, too, how a man without fear will go among dragons and serpents and, with God’s sanction, protect his tribe. People tell how Elmo crawled into the dark of the rafters with a kerosene lantern and piece of hard hickory and, catching them in that writhing knot, beat them to mush against the boards till they stopped singing and there was no sound in that tight space but him, breathing hard.
His daddy could not have been any other kind of man, not weak