Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(155)

They stopped and said hey to his sister Frankie Jean, who talked about Uncle Will floating out of his grave in the great deluge, and then they got back into the Buick and went to see the other kin, there in their stone garden.

He drove north out of Ferriday on US 425, toward Clayton. He took a right on McAdams Road just before the rusted drawbridge over the muddy Tensas River, then another right on Indian Village Road. “There used to be a pretty little farm right here,” he said, and he looked for it, but it was gone. He rolled slowly between fallow fields and coasted up to the iron gate of the small cemetery like a man walking softly down a hallway to keep from waking a sleeping child. He stepped out, eased shut the door, and walked without sound through the thick grass. He left the Killer in the car.

His people rest in the third row. He walked past them, one by one, silent, the dead leaves, the first of the year this far south, scudding on the breeze across the ground.

Steve Allen Lewis

Feb. 27, 1959–April 22, 1962

Elmo Kidd Lewis

Jan. 8, 1902–July 21, 1979

Elmo Kidd Lewis, Jr.

Nov. 11, 1929–Aug. 6, 1938

Mamie Herron Lewis

March 17, 1912–April 21, 1971

Jerry Lee Lewis, Jr.

Nov. 2, 1954–Nov. 13, 1973

Shawn Michelle Lewis

(No birth date)–Aug. 24, 1983



Only Jaren was buried elsewhere.

He moved back down the row to stand before Junior.

“I have had a good life,” he said, “but we do lose our children.”

His back gave out as he walked the few steps back to the graves of his mama and daddy, and he sagged against the granite of Elmo’s headstone. “Daddy,” he said, “you won’t mind me resting my back?”

He leaned there for some time.

Later, in the fading light, he pointed the car back toward the big river.

“I’s just trying to make a record,” he said.





EPILOGUE



KILLER


I had to know. Who, besides the great Kenny Lovelace, would Jerry Lee Lewis want to play his music with in the Great Beyond, assuming he ever actually embraces mortality and goes?

He thought a moment, then named off the great stylists. He would like to see Hank Williams in that cowboy hat, free of the pain of his twisted spine. He would like to hear Jimmie Rodgers sing through clean, strong lungs, the tuberculosis left behind on some worldly plane. He would like to talk a long while with Al Jolson, once called the world’s greatest entertainer, who if you believe some historians, actually sang himself to death. In the Beyond, there would be no needles, no reek of raw corn liquor or bathtub gin, no pills, none of those rattling bones. But if you scrubbed them all of their pain, their addictions, their obsession, would they—any of them—be the same?

I thought of that Tom Waits song, the one about how, “If I exorcise my devils, / Well, my angels may leave too. / When they leave, they’re so hard to find.” Still, Jerry Lee would like to see them all gathered ’round his piano, with Kenny playing lead guitar and some red-hot fiddle, singing their songs, all their songs, on a never-dying rotation: “Sheltering Palms” and “You Win Again” and “Waitin’ on a Train” and “Shakin’”—wouldn’t “Shakin’” just make Jolson’s eyes bug out? And in the audience would be his people, all his people, everyone he had ever lost.

I think about that, about the four of them together, and it makes me hope that my own mother is right, that there is something out there beyond this.

“Can you just imagine it?” Jerry Lee says.

When I was done with this book, I had one line left in my notes that made no sense. It did not fit anything around it, and so I could not use the usual clues to make sense of it. It just read:

he never straightened me out



The thing is, in his story, it could have meant anything, at any moment, in any situation. It could have been anyone. I had long given up on it when it finally hit me. It was Jerry Lee, talking about the piano teacher, the one who slapped him and swore to break him of his boogie-woogie. It had come up, out of the clear blue, in the middle of another thought, a whole other conversation, just a thing on his mind, slicing straight through. But now I know it was perhaps the most important of lines, because, good Lord, what if he had?

When I was done with the interviews, as the long, hot summer faded, I walked over to the bed and shook his hand.

“I will try to write a good book,” I told him.

“I know you will, Killer,” he said.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


From Rick Bragg

Writing about a long life is easy, next to living it. For that reason I have to first thank Jerry Lee Lewis, who day after day walked off through the past and came back, sometimes bloody, with the stories that made this book possible. I hope, at least, it was easier remembering it than living it. I thank him for more than that. He was not, in hot spells in his life, a man to be admired, but I liked him when it was all over, and have seldom enjoyed sitting beside a man so much, hearing his life told out loud. He broke my heart a hundred times, and made me laugh a thousand or more. I do not feel guilty about it. Life is dirty and hard, and he reminded me that even in the middle of that junkyard there is great beauty, if you only listen.

It is hard to write a legend. It is impossible to do it without tremendous help from living souls and new and dusty old books and endless stories told in newspapers, magazines, album notes, newsletters, and more. People almost always say, on a page like this, that there are too many people to thank, but in a legend as large as Jerry Lee Lewis, I believe that to be more true than usual.