Kate Wolf

Five years before Kate Wolf died of leukemia, I was forty years old, living in a hired man's shack with an open pint of Jim Beam and a Martin guitar that I could not chord. Across the haughty hills of Marin County, big productive Holstein cows were being branded on their faces and sold for slaughter. The USDA had determined that there was a surplus of milk on this planet.
I worked for a woman who owned just a little too much of northern California. The toughest parts of the job were disposing of a thousand dollars cash money every month and suppressing the desire to strangle peacocks. I was wearing out my bootsoles walking around pool tables. I believed that old drunks spoke the truth.
One Sunday morning came down awfully hard. I awoke with a flash of energy as the last of the double shots and slow dances with Roberta, a Jackson Pollack tattooed on her left breast, blew through my nerve endings. Five minutes later, the goddess of excess smote me behind the right ear with a splitting maul, and I crawled back into the bunkhouse flannel with the Sunday Chronicle.
In it was a small panel advertisement announcing that, on that day, a healing fair was to be held in Cotati, with Mimi Farina and Kate Wolf providing the tunes. Two bucks. Cheaper than church. I did need the healing. I fired up Red-haired Nancy, the Ford stock truck and rolled down into the flatlands above the Bay.
Mimi sang in semi-tongues of neo-Christian joy. Kate Wolf sang of dirt and love and working hands and feathers and honest eyes and freedom lost and found. Kate sang of the bunkhouse soul. The static in my head sucked at her voice. I jerked down my hat against the sun and studied her breasts. I was on the way to being healed. I simply had to change my ways.
It took four sober bunkhouse nights to compose a letter of courtship to Kate Wolf. I told it all…of learning whiskey in the morning in the milkhouse from Uncle Mart, and how he died in the morning pitching hay to the horses, of poaching a deer on the Pine Ridge Reservation on my wedding night and of the sweaty terror of a rotting marriage in the shadow of Harvard Square. I told of imaginary chess games with Harley McGhee, through the iron wall, in the next cell, the man without a tongue. I professed an admiration for her very essence and promised that if she ever needed anything, she had only to think my name and I would be there to help.
The bosswoman flaunted a smoky intuition. She was sure that Kate Wolf lived in Berkeley, so I laid all my whiskey need before a directory assistance operator, and he granted me the address for Kate Wolf, in Berkeley. I whispered to the stamps as I licked them.
I spent a week of afternoons fixing fence within sight of the mailbox, every night fighting the urge to shoot nineball and play eyefuck with the barmaids, until finally a legal-size envelope arrived from Kate Wolf, in Berkeley. I squatted in the red dirt beside the road to Point Reyes and smelled the letter carefully before opening it.

Dear Sir,
Thank you so much for the letter.
You have led a very interesting life,
and you seem to be a very kind man.
I must confess to you, though, that I
am not the Kate Wolf who sings.
I am Kate Wolf, the nurse.
If, on the other hand, the Kate Wolf who sings
is getting these kinds of letters,
I intend to learn how to play the guitar.
Yours Truly,
Kate Wolf

She enclosed the original letter. I went back to the barroom when I should've gone to Berkeley. But Kate Wolf's music continued to heal. I learned the words and the chords to "Green Eyes” and began to care whether I died in a barroom toilet. I drank the whiskey stash on the mud porch dry, then didn't replace it. I washed the truck.
When Kate Wolf played the community center in Petaluma, I sat with my toes curled in my boots. Afterward, I stood at the periphery of fans until it was my turn to shake her hand, and I told her the story of the mistaken identity, and delivered the letter.
She read it there on the basketball court, patting her foot in three-quarter time. She smelled of lemon grass. When she finished the reading she folded the letter into the pocket of her skirt then wrote her mailing address on the envelope and handed it to me. "Write to me more, from Idaho." She winked.
Kate Wolf, the singer, and I became the best of pen pals. When her bone marrow transplant failed we were discussing the perfect Koolaid mustache.