Johnny Cash: The Life Read Online Free Page B

Ray Cash could be cruel, especially when he drank too much. Many of J.R.’s relatives and schoolboy chums would challenge that description of Ray. They said old man Cash was simply gruff, like most hardworking men in Depression-ravaged rural America. But J.R.’s list of complaints against his father went further than not hearing “I love you” regularly.
    J.R. was forever wounded when he came home from grade school and found his dog lying dead in the woods near the house. To J.R.’s horror, he learned that his father had shot the animal after it broke into the chicken coop and killed a half-dozen chickens. Most of their neighbors would have done the same thing, but other farmers would have found a more humane way to tell their youngsters, perhaps simply saying the animal had run away. J.R. sensed that his father almost felt glee in telling him about the shooting.
    Years later, Ray Cash said he wished he had handled the incident differently. “I wouldn’t have killed that dog if I had thought about it,” he told Christopher S. Wren for a biography, The Life of Johnny Cash: Winners Got Scars Too, in the early 1970s. “I dragged the dog back into the woods. I hated the killing, but it was done. J.R. found the dog and he came and asked me why I shot him. I told him. He never said anything about it to this day.”
    Though the elder Cash never said anything on the record about his thoughts regarding J.R. and Jack, there remained a lingering resentment over the tragedy.
    “Grandpa always kind of blamed Dad for Jack’s death,” says Cash’s daughter Kathy. “And Dad had this real sad guilt thing about him his whole life. You could just see it in his eyes. You can look at almost any picture and see this dark sadness thing going on. Dad even told me…that one time when his daddy had been drinking, he said something like, ‘Too bad it wasn’t you instead of Jack.’ I said, ‘Oh, my God, Dad. What a horrible thing to say.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I think about that every time I see him.’”
IV
    J.R. was walking down a colony road one day more than a year after Jack’s death when he was surprised to hear music coming from one of the wooden houses. He didn’t know at first if the voice and guitar strumming were from a record or someone inside. Curious, he walked up to the door, where he saw a boy about his age singing and playing an old Ernest Tubb hit called “Drivin’ Nails in My Coffin.”
    The boy, Jesse Barnhill, invited J.R. inside; he was delighted someone else was interested in music. J.R. had seen the teenager around school, but he had never spent any time with him. Jesse suffered from polio, which made walking difficult and clumsy. His paralyzed right arm was only half as long as his left, and his right hand was withered. J.R. marveled that the boy could play the guitar.
    Jesse tried to teach J.R. how to play, but J.R. didn’t catch on. Even so, J.R. longed for one of the guitars he saw in the Sears Roebuck catalog, especially the Gene Autry model, thinking it would be fun to hold while he was singing. But the family couldn’t afford it, so he mostly just sang along while Jesse copied the guitar parts from the records.
    Not only did J.R. start spending a lot of time with Jesse, but also he helped his friend overcome his hesitancy and brave the outside world—ignoring the kids who made fun of him. With J.R. leading the way, they’d go to the town center, usually to see a movie or listen to the jukebox in the tiny café. They’d often be joined by Harry Clanton, who was in J.R.’s class. J.R. liked Harry because he had a wonderful sense of humor, and J.R. loved a good joke. Together, J.R. and Harry became known as cutups and pranksters in class—going to elaborate means to entertain the other students with such antics as leaving a dead squirrel in the teacher’s desk drawer or causing havoc in the library by pulling out scores of books and putting them back in the wrong places.
    When J.R. was feeling