Dear Hank Williams Read online

  PS—Did you know they played baseball in Japan? Coolie’s pen pal, Keinosuke, is a big fan of the Osaka Tigers. We have the L.S.U. Tigers in Baton Rouge. Japan is more like us than I ever imagined.

  October 18, 1948

  Dear Mr. Williams,

  I’VE MISSED PRACTICING my singing all week. I have the croup! The cough settled in my chest, and my voice comes out all crackly. When I speak, I sound like a bullfrog. Frog tries to make me talk just so he can laugh. Aunt Patty Cake quarantined me to my bedroom, but whenever she isn’t nearby, Frog eases the door open and stands where only his right eye and nostril are visible. “Whatcha in bed for?” he asks for about the billionth time.

  “I have the croup!” I croak, again.

  Then, for about the zillionth time, Frog cracks up and slams the door. I can hear him giggling all the way down the hall and outside on the porch. Aunt Patty Cake never catches him, though.

  The last couple of days, I’ve spent a lot of time staring out the window, not to spy but because I’m b-o-r-e-d. I’ve read both of my Nancy Drew books twice. There’s nothing else to do. Yesterday at two o’clock, when Mrs. Applebud crossed the street to the cemetery, I tried to see if I could hold my breath until she reached the other side. I gave up because I was about to faint.

  This morning there was a funeral for Arnold Fontenot, the barber. From my bed I could see and hear the doors of all the cars and trucks opening and closing across the street. Almost every man who lives in and around Rippling Creek went to Mr. Fontenot for their haircuts. They told him everything they knew, and sometimes he did the same. Uncle Jolly got in the habit of going to the barbershop whether he needed a haircut or not. He went to hear the gossip about what was going on around Rippling Creek.

  Think of all the stories that got buried with Arnold Fontenot this morning. Although I’ll bet he didn’t take them all to the grave.

  Bored and suffering mighty awful,

  Tate P.

  October 19, 1948

  Dear Mr. Williams,

  IT HAS ONLY BEEN a day since I wrote the last letter, but I thought I’d write you again (seeing as there’s nothing else to do).

  When I handed my letter to Aunt Patty Cake to mail yesterday, she asked, “You reckon he reads your letters?”

  Her question made my blood boil, and nothing is worse than someone who has the croup and is mad, too. “Of course he does,” I said. “He sent me two autographed pictures, didn’t he?” I figured Aunt Patty Cake was adding up all those three-cent stamps in her head.

  You do read my letters, don’t you, Mr. Williams? I just wish I had a sign. I know I shouldn’t have bragged about you sending me a picture, but I couldn’t help but let it slip to Verbia Calhoon. It was third Sunday, the Sunday she sings her solo. Everybody made such a big deal about her off-key version of “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” I had to deflate her a bit. People should not walk around with such a puffed-up idea of who they really are. But I should have known better than to let her air out, because she said, “Oh, those singers don’t sign those pictures. They have a whole bunch of people who do that for them.”

  Sorry, but I couldn’t think of anything to say except, “Well, he ain’t that famous yet,” which I do believe made her day.

  But Aunt Patty Cake should know better than to doubt. She believes anything else like it’s the God’s truth. Even all those sad stories on Queen for a Day. Whoever has the most pitiful tales wins something wonderful like a washing machine. Every day when Uncle Jolly comes home from work, Aunt Patty Cake gives him the Queen for a Day report. “Today the lady who won told about how her house burned down. All her family owned were the clothes on their back.”

  “Who did she beat out?” Uncle Jolly asked, holding back a yawn.

  “A woman whose husband left her.”

  Uncle Jolly was wide awake now. “Was she pretty?”

  “What do you mean, was she pretty? I was listening to the radio.”

  “Did she sound pretty?”

  * * *

  Sitting in bed makes me do a lot of wishing.

  I wish I didn’t have the croup.

  I wish Frog’s bicycle wasn’t messed up.

  I wish my momma was done with that movie.

  I wish Verbia Calhoon’s blond hair would turn green.

  Wishing and hoping,

  Tate P.

  October 26, 1948

  Dear Mr. Williams,

  I’M BECOMING AN EXPERT circus-goer. You might have thought the Clyde Beatty Circus beat all, but yesterday Uncle Jolly took me to the Greatest Show on Earth, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. He picked me up from school early so that we could go to the matinee show. Verbia’s momma picked her up early too. That’s because she was sick with the croup. Poor pitiful Verbia.

  Back to the circus—my brain is still dazzled by the sight of it all—fifty elephants, clowns, and the most incredible acrobats. Why, Rose Gold, the trapeze artist, swung right over my head! If I stood and stretched, I believe I could have touched her toes. When Emmett Kelly (he’s that famous clown) circled the ring, I figured this is a clown Frog wouldn’t be afraid of. Emmett’s face is sweet and sorrowful, not at all scary.

  Frog missed the circus again! This time he had the croup. And if you think I sounded funny when I was sick, you should hear Frog say “Whatcha” in his bullfrog voice. I saved some of my cotton candy for him, but when I offered it to him later, he just scrunched his face and shook his head. Remember, this is the boy who thinks yams taste like candy.

  Across from where we sat I could see a group of orphans from the Masonic Home for Children. I wonder what it would be like to not have a momma and a daddy. Thank goodness I don’t have to ever find that out.

  Expert circus-goer,

  Tate P.

  PS—The circus had a long parade called the Night Before Christmas. Can you believe Christmas will be here in no time at all? And so will the Father and Daughter Potluck Banquet at our church. More about that next time. Or as they say on the radio—to be continued.

  November 4, 1948

  Dear Mr. Williams,

  OF ALL THE ROTTEN LUCK! Dolores made up with Uncle Jolly. I should have known. He’d stopped singing that song by Sons of the Pioneers that goes, You’ll never know how I cried when I found out you’d lied.

  The next sign was when he woke up yesterday morning like it was Christmas and he replaced that sad song with “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” He moved around our house like he was dancing a jig. Aunt Patty Cake asked him to slow it down. He was making our walls shake. Once, your picture fell and hit the radio. Uncle Jolly is not light on his feet. When Aunt Patty Cake told him to slow down, he grabbed hold of her hand and raised it high in the air. Then he twirled her underneath like she was a spinning top.

  “James Irwin Poche, stop this silliness!” she yelled, but she didn’t stop dancing.

  When he went for another round, she let go and flopped back on the sofa, declaring, “Enough!”

  Then Uncle Jolly grabbed my wrist and dragged me to the floor. It was fun, Uncle Jolly two-stepping me around the room with sweat glistening on his forehead and his belly bouncing like a bowl of Jell-O.

  Anyway, I should have known Uncle Jolly and Dolores got back together by those signs. But no, I didn’t realize what had happened until this morning. Uncle Jolly had promised to take me to see the new Donald O’Connor picture show at the Don Theatre in Alexandria. When we headed out of Rippling Creek, Uncle Jolly turned toward Glenmora instead of Alexandria. For a second I thought we might be going to the picture show in Glenmora, but before long we turned onto a dirt road that seemed to wind back into the woods forever. When we reached Dolores’s house (which looks like the Big Bad Wolf could blow it down in a single puff), Uncle Jolly hopped out of his truck. “Wait here, Sweet Tater. I’ll be right back.” He sucked in his gut as he walked toward her front door. Purple-headed Dolores came out wearing a flowered dress and white gloves. How was she going to eat popcorn in those silly thin
gs?

  Uncle Jolly opened the gate so that Miss Prissy could prance through. Then he asked me to step out of the truck to let her slide in next to him. A second later, I was jammed up against the window, inhaling Dolores’s stinky perfume. The handle that rolls down the window was poking the side of my hip. That made it official. Dolores is a pain in the butt!

  Miserable over Uncle Jolly’s choice in women,

  Tate P.

  PS—I can’t believe I never asked you—do you have a girl?

  November 12, 1948

  Dear Mr. Williams,

  NEXT FRIDAY IS the Father and Daughter Potluck Banquet at our church. Next to the May Festival Talent Contest, it is the most exciting time of the year. The daughters are supposed to make a favorite dish to share with the other fathers and daughters. I’m making a secret yam dish. Frog will be my taste tester since he’s eaten about a million of them. I already know I’m going to have lots of butter and cane syrup in my dish. The cane syrup is the secret ingredient because when most folks think about sweetening yams, they think brown sugar. I’m not like most folks. And I want my secret yam dish to be a genuine true Louisiana dish. There’ll be no store-bought butter in my special recipe. No sirree. The butter will be from Ebby Kizer’s cow.

  Here’s how it happened: On a recent Delightfully Devine Beauty Products modeling assignment, I tried on Florida Sunrise Pink lipstick for Ebby. Now, Ebby doesn’t fool like the other customers. She’s on the plump side and has close-set eyes. The left one floats around as if it’s scoping out the entire room. Her legs have bumpy trails that look like snakes under the skin. Aunt Patty Cake calls them the worst case of varicose veins she’s ever seen. Still, after Constance Washington, Ebby is Aunt Patty Cake’s best customer. “I do the best with what I’ve got,” Ebby says (which I’m sorry to say isn’t much).

  Aunt Patty Cake calls Ebby’s husband, Newman, an asset to her business. When I try on something that Ebby takes a notion to, she’ll sample it herself. Then she goes in the next room, where Newman is doing his daily crossword puzzle.

  “What do you think, Newman?” She pokes out her lips, turning them into a smooching pout.

  Newman peers over his glasses and says, “Oh, honey. I wish you’d get some. In fact, you ought to get two tubes.”

  Aunt Patty Cake keeps applying more products on Ebby until she’s about a layer short of looking like Emmett Kelly (remember the circus clown?). By the time we’re done with our call, Aunt Patty Cake has made her biggest sale of the week. I reckon you can see why she checks to see if Newman’s blue truck is parked outside before she calls on Ebby.

  When I told Ebby about making a secret yam dish for the banquet, she said, “Well, then I think you need to have the best butter in Rapides Parish to go in that dish.” If there was an entry for homemade butter at the Rapides Parish Fair, Ebby would win a blue ribbon. Ebby’s cow, Mrytis, gives the best milk. Last summer the Kizers invited us over to eat some blackberry ice cream they’d made from it. So when Ebby offered me butter made from Mrytis’s milk, I accepted wholeheartedly.

  Yesterday I decided I needed one more ingredient for my secret yam dish. I let Frog decide if it should be cinnamon or vanilla. Frog said a little of both would do the trick. He also said my dish should have a good name, like the title of a song. I settled on Secret Agent Yam Mash. It sounded like something a spy for Governor Earl K. Long would make. Frog agreed.

  You’re probably wondering how I’m going to attend the Father and Daughter Potluck Banquet when my daddy is all the way over in Paris, France, taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower. Well, Uncle Jolly, of course! He’s not my daddy, but he will do in a pinch.

  I can’t wait until all those folks at church ask me what my secret ingredient is.

  Your fan and creator of the Secret Agent Yam Mash,

  Tate P.

  PS—The night before the banquet, Aunt Patty Cake is going to roll my hair in rags. I’ll bet I’ll have more curls than Verbia.

  November 16, 1948

  Dear Mr. Williams,

  THE OTHER DAY when I was rehearsing my song, I started wondering if you had a special lady. Then you go and sing with your missus. When they announced that Mrs. Hank Williams would be singing with you, it was as if you were reaching out of the radio to personally deliver my answer. After you finished that gospel duet, I said, “I’ll bet Mrs. Williams is real pretty.”

  Uncle Jolly said, “Of course she is. I can tell by her voice.” Uncle Jolly thinks if someone doesn’t sing good on the radio then they must be good-looking. (Just a reminder—Uncle Jolly is no expert on singing.)

  Do you have any children? If you do, is one of them a girl my age? If there was a Father and Daughter Potluck Banquet at your church, I’ll bet you would take her even if it was on the night of the Louisiana Hayride. I don’t know why, but I’m just certain you would. I feel as sure about that as Uncle Jolly feels sure about your wife being pretty. And if my daddy wasn’t all the way over in Paris, France, he’d be taking me too.

  Sure of a lot of things,

  Tate P.

  PS—I can’t wait to tell you what everyone thinks of my Secret Agent Yam Mash and my curls.

  November 20, 1948

  Dear Mr. Williams,

  WHY, OH WHY, did Dolores pick the day of the Father and Daughter Potluck Banquet to break up for good with Uncle Jolly?

  Apparently she went and fell in love with a fellow named Chester Fairfield from Oakdale. Rumor has it, Uncle Jolly found out the hard way. He caught them zipping around Glenmora in Chester’s new Chevrolet Fleetmaster. Now Uncle Jolly has the lovesick blues.

  I guess he found all that out a few hours before I started dressing for the Father and Daughter Potluck Banquet. I was ready thirty minutes early. My Secret Agent Yam Mash was in Aunt Patty Cake’s best bowl, wrapped with a warm towel. I was wearing my pink Sunday dress that Aunt Patty Cake bought for me at Penney’s in Alexandria. And when she untied the rags in my hair, the curls came out somewhat tighter than I’d preferred, like a bunch of skinny mattress springs glued to my scalp. I’m not complaining. If anyone asks me about them, I’ll just say it’s the newest look from Hollywood.

  Thirty minutes after the banquet was supposed to start, Aunt Patty Cake said, “We might as well eat. My mouth has been watering for that secret recipe of yours, Tate.” But I told her no, maybe Uncle Jolly was just running late.

  Frog and I settled on the porch steps. The moon was a great big buttermilk pie against the black sky. It stared down on me as if it was saying, “Still waiting?”

  It was eight thirty before Uncle Jolly drove up. By then the banquet was halfway over. Remember I told you what else Uncle Jolly was addicted to? Well, it was clear he’d been at the Wigwam partaking in that addiction. He eased the car door open, but he lost hold of it. Then he leaned way over, trying to grab at the door to catch his fall. Lucky him, he caught it. He swung his legs out of the car and carefully stood. Still gripping the door, he hollered in a slurred voice, “I’ll be ready directly, Sweet Tater.” Then he rocked back and forth on his feet while he held on. Finally he straightened and swaggered toward the house.

  Frog spit on the ground. That’s how you know he’s good and mad. I scooted over and let Uncle Jolly stumble up the steps. This time he forgot to open the door. He fell plumb through the screen and knocked the door off its hinges. Now it’s good and broken.

  Aunt Patty Cake rushed out to the porch, where Uncle Jolly lay facedown on top of the door. She opened her mouth a few times like she was going to give him a big ole speech, but all she managed was to shake her head and say, “Just leave him be.”

  She turned, and we followed her into the house, making giant steps over Uncle Jolly’s body like he was a muddy rug we didn’t want to wipe our feet on. Aunt Patty Cake set the table with sliced ham, leftover turnip greens, and my Secret Agent Yam Mash, but I didn’t want to eat. I had a big hole inside me. Nothing could fill it. And here’s the thing of it all—Uncle Jolly is not my daddy, and Big Pe
te might as well not be too.

  When I was little, I would ask Aunt Patty Cake, “Was my daddy a bad man?”

  “Now, baby, you have asked me that question a hundred times before.”

  “Well, maybe I need to know again,” I’d say.

  At breakfast, a while back, I asked Uncle Jolly about him. He told me, “Tate, your daddy wasn’t a bad boy in the breaking-the-law sort of way. Let’s just say he was a tomcat.”

  “But you never tell me what that means.”

  Aunt Patty Cake placed a plate of fried eggs and a slice of ham in front of me. “It meant he went a-creeping and a-crawling where he shouldn’t have been.”

  “Is that why Momma ran him off?”

  Aunt Patty Cake sighed. “Yes, ma’am, it is. Now stop asking your questions and eat.”

  Here is all I know about Big Pete:

  –He is not a photographer, although he did leave behind a bunch of pictures he took when he and Momma went to Grand Isle on their honeymoon, and a pair of boots that I hate and Frog loves.

  –He is not married to my momma anymore.

  –He is not anywhere I know, and probably anywhere he wants me to know.

  –The only thing I know about my daddy is his name, which he gave to me.

  Sorry for the shameful lie,

  Tate P. (which I wish stood for Patricia)

  PS—I’ll tell you the real story about my momma tomorrow.

  November 21, 1948

  Dear Mr. Williams,

  I KNOW YOU MUST THINK I’m the biggest liar in the great state of Louisiana, but Aunt Patty Cake told me to lock my lips about my parents’ real lives. She says, “No use inviting trouble.” Before I knew it, my little white lie grew and grew. Because Momma really is famous, and she did work in the picture-show business. But just not quite how I told it.