In the hallway, Kinsley walked past the open door, toward the kitchen. He didn’t glance this way. Witness waited for the attorney to reappear, belatedly alerted by peripheral vision, but domestic noises in the kitchen suggested that no confrontation was imminent.
How would he react to finding a stranger—a strong young man in boots, jeans, and sweater—in his apartment as if by magic? With the fear of an old man weakened by time or with the calm authority of a lawyer still confident after decades of courtroom triumphs? Witness suspected that this was a man whose composure wasn’t easily shaken.
Two walls of the room featured floor-to-ceiling shelves packed full of books. Most of them were books of laws, of cases that were significant for the interpretations of laws that set precedents, and thick biographies of important figures in the history of American jurisprudence.
With reverence, Witness slid one hand lightly across the spines of those books. Where he came from, there were no laws, no attorneys, no judges, no juries, no trials. The innocent had been swept away by a brutal tide of belief in the primacy of the primitive, by faith in the wrong things, by rebellion against reality and the elevation of idiot conviction to the status of the single Truth. He had killed many people in his time, certain that he would never be held to account for the blood he spilled. Nevertheless, he held the law in high regard, just as a man who lived in godless despair might esteem the
The storm was a gift. The lyrics of “One Rainy Night in Memphis” needed a melody with bounce but also with a melancholy edge, which was not an easy combination to achieve, especially for Twyla Trahern. The bounce part gave her no difficulty, but melancholy was for her a secondhand experience, something that happened to other people, and though she had written a few melancholy songs before, she needed a moody environment to inspire her. With her guitar, she sat on a stool by a window in the study of her apartment on the second floor of the Pendleton, gazing at the timely rain, at the city lights twinkling in the premature twilight that the thunderheads impressed upon the day, picking out notes and trying various chords, seeking the sound of sorrow.
Although she didn’t always compose this way, she got the chorus first, because that was where the bounce needed to be most emphatic. She worked on it—the final refinements would be made at the piano—leaving the eight-bar bridge for later, which she would write after she had extrapolated the clean lines of the melody from the refrain.
As usual, she had earlier laid down the lyrics line by line, verse by verse, polishing each until it had a shine but not so much that it was slick. Shine without slickness was a hard standard to meet. Many lyricists could spring all the way through a song, knowing that a few lines weren’t good enough, that they would have to go back later to rewrite, but Twyla could not work that way. Sometimes, to get the syncopations correct, to make the syllables fall gracefully with the music, she would have to tweak the words once she completed the melody, but tweaking always proved to be the extent of it.
She wrote country and she was country, the daughter of a farmer who lost his farm in the recession of 1980, when she was two years old. He worked thereafter as a maintenance mechanic in a coal-fired power plant, mostly in windowless chambers where the heat could reach 130 degrees. Ten hours a day, five and sometimes six days a week. Sweating continuously. Often doing dangerous work in air smoky with the fine ash of pulverized coal that was flash-burned in a continuous controlled explosion. Winston Trahern endured his job for twenty-two years, to keep his family clothed and fed and comfortable. Twyla never heard her dad complain, and he always showered at the plant, after his shift, and came home looking fresh and clean. When Twyla was twenty-four, a coal cracker at the plant exploded, killing her father and two other men.
She had gotten from him the sunny disposition that made it hard work to write a melancholy song, which was a better inheritance than a pot of money would have been.
As flags of rain unfurled across the city and rippled down the window glass, the melody coalesced around the lyrics. Twyla began to realize she was writing a song that nobody could sing better than Farrel Barnett, her former husband. His first big hit as a performer and her first top-ten tune as a songwriter was “Leaving Late and Low,” and they were married as she finished writing four songs for his second CD.
At the time, she thought she loved Farrel. Maybe she did. Eventually, she realized that in part she had been drawn to him because his eyes were the same shade of blue as her daddy’s and because he had about him an air of trustworthiness and unshakable good cheer reminiscent of Win Trahern.
In Farrel’s case, the cheerfulness was real, though sometimes manic and sometimes inappropriate to the moment. But the trustworthy air was a projection as ephemeral as the beam of light that paints pictures on a movie screen. He went through women like a tornado through a Kansas town, tearing apart other marriages and stripping his more vulnerable lovers of their sense of self-worth as if he took pleasure not in the sex but instead in the destruction that he left behind. Although he always treated Twyla tenderly, he was not as respectful of other women. On a few occasions, one of these wretched specimens, rinsed through with bitterness, washed up on Twyla’s doorstep, as though having endured Farrel Barnett made them sisters in suffering who could console each other and plan a mutual vengeance.
After four years, she had no longer loved him. She had needed two more years before she realized that if she didn’t divorce him, he would blow apart her life and scatter the wreckage so widely that she wouldn’t be able to put herself together as she’d once been. By then, Farrel had made the country-music charts with fifteen songs, twelve written by Twyla, eight of which reached number one.
More important, they created a child together—Winston, named for Twyla’s father—and Twyla was at first determined that Winny would not be raised in a home without a dad. Eventually she came to understand that in some rare cases, a broken home might be better for a boy than one in which his narcissistic old man showed up only occasionally and then merely to recuperate from touring and from marathon adultery, less engaged with his young son than with his little entourage of sycophantic buddies.
Although she didn’t love Farrel anymore, didn’t even like him much, she didn’t hate him, either. When she finished “One Rainy Night in Memphis,” she would offer it to Farrel first because he would do the best job with it. Her songs supported her aging mother. They were Winny’s future. What was best for a song trumped settling old scores.
When the rumble rose not from the storm-torn heavens but from the ground under the building, Twyla’s fingers froze on the frets and raised the plectrum from the strings. As the last chord faded, she felt tremors pass through the Pendleton. Her Grammy and Country Music Association awards rattled on the glass shelves in the display case behind her piano.
In expectation of some impending disaster, she was still gazing through the tall window when barbed lashes
