Johnny Cash: The Life Read Online Free

end was imminent, and they crowded into the hospital room.
    “[Jack] started to groan and asked Mama to hold his hand,” Cash said, remembering the farewell scene late in life. He said his brother closed his eyes and told Carrie he was at a river. “One way goes to the bad place; the other way goes to the light. I’m going to the light.” Then he said, “Can you hear the angels singing? Look at this city, this beautiful city, the gold and all the jewels, the angels. Listen, Mama, can you hear them?”
    He died Saturday morning.
    Pretty much the whole town came to the funeral on Sunday and joined the family in singing favorite hymns. Jack was buried in a cemetery in nearby Wilson; the words on the gravestone read “Meet Me in Heaven,” Years later, Cash would use the phrase in a song. At the height of his stardom in 1970, Cash would also dedicate his songbook, Songs of Johnny Cash, to his brother.
    We lost you one sad day in May 1944.
Though the songs that we sang
Are gone from the cotton fields
I can hear the sound of your voice
As they are sung far and wide
    In loving memory
Your brother, J.R.
    Still reeling, the Cash family was back in the fields on Monday picking cotton. The crops wouldn’t wait. The loss of her son, however, was too much for Carrie.
    “I watched as my mother fell to her knees and let her head drop onto her chest,” Cash recalled in his 1997 autobiography. “My poor daddy came up to her and took her arm, but she brushed him away. ‘I’ll get up when God pushes me up!’”
    Finally, slowly and painfully, she got back to her feet and resumed picking cotton. She still had a husband to care for and children to raise.
    Through the week, J.R. kept thinking about his brother’s words—about a crossroads between the lightness and the dark. “I made my choice after his death which way I was going to go,” Cash decades later told a friend, producer-director James Keach. “I answered a call to come down the aisle [in church] and shook the preacher’s hand and I accepted Jesus Christ as savior that next Sunday.
    “[Jack’s] been with me all these years, and sometimes when I [was] so messed up, in such bad trouble, in jail somewhere, I would say, ‘I know you’re really ashamed of me.’ I’m still talking to him. A lot of things might have been different if it weren’t for him. He knew about the entertainment world. He knew about the trash that went on. My father would always talk about the evil stage, the evil show business. But Jack didn’t. He encouraged me.”
    J.R. tried to avoid his father’s eyes in the months after Jack’s death because he didn’t want to see the disappointment and the blame. His father had told J.R. the accident would never have happened if he had kept his brother from going to the school shop that day, but really, what could he have done?
    During this time, J.R. became increasingly distant, showing little interest in school or hanging out with his pals. More than ever, he treasured his time alone, whether it was at the fishing pond or the school library. Even when he was around friends, they’d often notice a lonely, melancholy quality about him. Rosanne, his daughter, believes a part of that sense of sadness never left her father. “Dad was wounded so profoundly by Jack’s death, and by his father’s reaction—the blame and recrimination and bitterness,” she says. “If someone survives that kind of damage, either great evil or great art can come out of it. And my dad had the seed of great art in him.”
    It was around this time that J.R. saw a movie that left a lasting impression on him. For most kids, Frankenstein, the 1931 film about a mad scientist who creates a monster by putting a criminal’s brain into his man-made being, was simply a scary horror story. But Cash felt sorry for the monster, who was killed by a mob that thought he’d murdered a young girl, when in fact the monster had tried to befriend her. Explaining his sympathy for the