Читать книгу Promises - Roger Elwood - Страница 9

Three months ago…

Carla had returned to Nashville from Hollywood after losing out on a movie role that she coveted, despite her Oscar win the year before. She was depressed, tempted to drown her sorrows in a bottle but with enough inner strength left to hold off just a bit longer.

Wandering the streets of Nashville, she recalled, like some pitiable waif, depending upon the kindness of strangers.

She had driven into town on her own, dismissing her driver, Rocco Gilardi, for the evening. The car she chose out of the half dozen she owned was her Jaguar convertible, driving it at top speed, the top down, the wind blowing her red hair in a dozen or more directions.

No state police stopped her, though she was hoping that someone would. She felt suicidal, wrenched as she was from the high of the Academy Awards triumph to being rejected in favor of a younger actress. Irving Chicolte had tried to argue that she was “big box office” now, her first picture after the Oscar earning $100 million plus in the United States alone where it played at a bit over two thousand theaters. Counting the foreign take, Chasing Dreams would eventually bring in nearly $200 million altogether, and that did not factor in the substantial video, cable and network broadcast revenue.

Yet she lost to someone ten years younger.

The news devastated her. Every time she passed by her Oscar statuette, it seemed to be mocking her, having promised a whole new world of career opportunities, and yet delivering little except invitations to entertainment industry functions which she had been attending anyway. Only now she was getting the better seats, either a table of her own or one that she would share on a given evening with the power elite.

From that glamorous company to the streets of Nashville, alone, walking aimlessly, not a soul in the world knowing or caring where I am tonight.

That was when she heard Kyle’s voice.

She stopped short, listening.

He left the splendor of heaven, knowing His destiny was the lonely hill of Golgotha, there to lay down His life for me…

She could not move, could not open her mouth or shut her eyes or turn her head.

If that isn’t love, the ocean is dry, there’s no star in the sky, and the sparrow can’t fly!

Suddenly she seemed to be gasping, as though someone had placed a pillow over her face and was suffocating her.

If that isn’t love, then heaven’s a myth, there’s no feeling like this, if that isn’t love.

A brief pause.

Then the second stanza was being sung.

Two voices.

She realized that there were two voices, one of which was strangely familiar, the other not recognizable at all. But it was the second that had hooked her, that had grabbed hold of her body and was now tugging at it.

Finally she could move.

She walked slowly, still unaware of her surroundings, her senses locked in on that voice as though it were a radar signal, drawing her toward it.

Lights ahead. Flashing lights.

Above the entrance to one of the myriad little clubs that was part of the Nashville music scene, clubs where fledgling country music stars often got their first taste of performing in public.

She walked up to the front door, which was open, and went inside.

In an instant she recognized one of the two performers on stage.

Darcy Reuther.

Carla had known the woman for many years.

What are you doing in a club like this? she thought. You’re a star. You should never descend back to this level. Are you crazy?

But then her attention drifted to the man standing next to Darcy. He was about a foot taller than she, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt and black vest.

As they finished the song, the audience of a few dozen people burst into applause that was loud and sustained. But nothing took Carla’s attention away from Darcy Reuther’s singing partner.

“I wrote that before Kyle Rivers was born,” Darcy said after the room was quieter, “so I guess I’m old enough tobe his grandmother!”

Laughter.

“But I’m not that fortunate,” she continued. “Nothing would have made me happier than to say Kyle is my grandspn son. I would have been very proud of him, as a young man, as a young singer.”

She turned to him.

“Kyle, would you do that number we discussed?” she asked.

He smiled, and nodded, then turned to the band leader and asked him to cease any accompaniment.

That departure from the norm for such clubs had not been scripted, so the members of the band seemed confused.

“I feel a special leading tonight,” he said. “All I need is my guitar.”

The band leader nodded understandingly, and gave him the sign of the cross.

“Praise God, brother, and thank you,” Kyle said.

And he began to sing “Amazing Grace” as Carla had never heard it sung before. Carla found herself staring at him, hardly blinking.

On the final stanza, Darcy Reuther joined in with Kyle.

“‘When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun,’“ they sang as though they had been doing duets together for a very long time, “‘we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’d first begun.’“

Carla could not move, not even to join in with the applause.

And then Darcy Reuther noticed that she was in the audience.

“We have a special patron tonight,” she said, “someone who is a country music legend and, now, an Oscar-winning actress.”

She pointed in Carla’s direction.

“Carla Gearhart is here tonight. Won’t you come up onstage, my dear friend?”

She did not want to do anything but leave, but she was caught literally in the spotlight and, in order to be gracious, she had to accept Darcy’s invitation.

After having met many male performers during ten years as a singer, while she was making hundreds of appearances in the main metropolitan areas of the United States as well as small country locations, Carla should not have been nervous to stand next to Kyle, to have him whisper into her ear that he had been a fan for a long time, to look briefly into his eyes.

“Carla, you didn’t really plan on this,” Darcy Reuther observed, “so I can’t ask you to sing anything tonight.”

As she said that, everyone in the small audience seemed to start shouting, “Sing, Carla, sing!”

She was at her best when she had had plenty of time to rehearse and so the idea of singing with no preparation played havoc with her normal confidence on stage.

“I have no idea what I could do tonight,” she muttered, partly to the audience, partly to Darcy.

Kyle whispered, “What about ‘Were You There?’ You sing the first stanza. I’ll do the second. Darcy can take the third. And the three of us can sing the fourth together.”

As an afterthought, he asked, “Do you know it?”

“Yes…I do,” she told him nervously.

“Let’s go ahead then, okay?”

“Sure.”

He kissed her on the cheek.

Carla had not sung that hymn in years but, somehow, she had never forgotten the words, the tempo, anything about it.

“‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’“ she began. “‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.’“

And she felt better about her unexpected performance in that little club than others that she had spent long hours rehearsing in order to face tens of thousands of people in a single stadium or arena.

Kyle and Darcy could do nothing but stand amazed, Carla seemingly at the top of her form during those few minutes.

Now it was Kyle’s turn.

“‘When through the woods and forest glades I wander,

and hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees…’“ he sang with great skill, imbuing that less familiar stanza with a power that seemed to shake the ceiling and the walls of the club.

Next, Darcy stepped into the spotlight.

“Something special is happening tonight,” she said. “I have heard the greatest female voice in the history of country-and-western, and I have heard the greatest young man’s voice in ages, and I must step aside. The spotlight is theirs tonight.”

More applause, louder, sustained.

“I have to ask Carla Gearhart and Kyle Rivers to sing the remaining stanzas while I sit down and enjoy them as you all are doing,” Darcy continued. “This is not a church, this club, but that’s okay, for I feel the Holy Spirit here just the same, and I think He is saying, ‘Let Carla and Kyle be a blessing to everyone!’“

The next day, Carla and Kyle went on their first date, beginning a relationship that they would come to pray would last a lifetime, and beyond.