How strange this dying is. Everything becomes so god-awful clear. Watching Jimmy’s big handsome head sing away to his family, I saw the whole spinning web of how we three got there on that couch.

Jim proposed on our third date. We’d gone strolling together down on Bandera. There was a warm breeze and I remember smelling fried corn tortillas from an eatery. There was an open farmer’s market near the theater and I could hear the cluck and cackle of live chickens. Jimmy insisted we buy one for my mother and Gram though they didn’t need a chicken and he hadn’t even met the widows. I stopped at the sidewalk and wouldn’t go in. The smile left his face and he held my hand in both of his. “All right. Marry me then, Katie Faye.” He looked down at the sidewalk a moment, then back at me, and it took every bit of my panhandle-girl resolve not to bust out and cry right there like a child. I couldn’t speak so I nodded yes and Jim hugged me so hard and so long I don’t remember feeling my feet lift off the ground.

We were married two weeks and a day from that night, on October 14, 1948. Mama insisted on a church wedding so we made it official at the base chapel. Jimmy’s mother and an uncle came down from Massachusetts by train. Our best man wasn’t Toby or Rex, but Jim’s bunkmate of one year, Ryder “Harmonica” Stillwell. Gram sprung for a photographer, a German from New Braunfels who took such care with each shot, I took to calling him Vinny Van Gogh. Before long, in the early days of December, I spent mealtimes feeling sick. It was the same week Jimmy’s enlistment was up, so two hours before my husband wasn’t a soldier anymore I went to the base doctor and was given that wonderful news, courtesy of the U.S. Army.

We moved into a boardinghouse a block from where I still worked three nights a week at the bowling alley. As Leo grew inside me, I worked my regular shift while Jim walked the sidewalks from Bandera to Texarkana looking for nightspots in which to give a humble show. We spent the afternoons together making love, and I still talked of Paris, I still thought it possible for our little family to go to France. Jim seemed neither for nor against the notion, simply preoccupied with getting work. Soon he found it, a Friday- and Saturday-night gig at a honky-tonk not far from Schnabel Park. I don’t recollect the exact name of the place, though I do remember Horse or Stallion being part of the sign. Jimmy lasted only two weekends there, as the tavern’s clientele were far more inclined to hear the twang and moan of some boy mocking Bob Wills or Patsy Cline, not some big-headed ex-soldier singing colored music from the cotton shacks of Louisiana. On that second and last Saturday night, I sat in the front sipping a Coca-Cola when an empty whiskey jigger hit Jim in the shoulder just as he was finishing up a rousing Lightning Hopkins song. I jerked around to see a tall sunburned ranch hand stand up and call my husband a nigger-lovin’ son of a bitch. Next thing I saw was Jim. He’d leapt off the stage with his guitar and was standing there in front of the tall drunk cowboy.