Almost Heaven (5 page)

When I was sure Billy was all right, I returned to find the home I had been following obliterated near the bridge, mixed now with the debris that piled higher. Scanning the murky stream, even with my abilities to see beyond that which humans can, I could find no living thing and feared Billy's father had perished.

However, after checking once more on Billy and seeing that he and his mother were moving toward safety, I made another trip. The area was devastated. Dwellings and businesses were wiped out as the spillage moved through the area like a deadly snake.

I spotted something moving near the edge of black water that had pooled. A coal-crusted hand struggled to break through. I could not tell if this was Billy's father because this person was indistinguishable. His clothes had been ripped from his body. Red leaked through a gash on his head near one eye.

Fearing that he would be unable to extricate himself on his own, and being a ministering spirit called to duty with humans, my first reaction was to reach down and pull him up onto a bank. It was such a small thing, really nothing at all, but as I sat near him, watching the water spill from his mouth and his breathing become more and more shallow, I remembered the instructions given and wondered if I had broken some trust between the human and the unseen world. And it was there on that muddy bank that I began to feel in a way I had never felt.

Humans struggle with the underside of the tapestry, unable to see the beauty in their situation, for they cannot know how the trouble of life fits with The Plan. On the other hand, those of us above are able to see a different view and the orchestration with which the world is held together and moved forward. Seemingly unrelated events below the tapestry take on new meaning from our vantage.

But sitting there next to the near-dead body of that man, watching the lives of people destroyed in a few moments of cacophonic peril, brought me close to the human condition. It gave a magnified vision of that which I had only considered from afar. Why would the Creator allow such wanton destruction and loss of life? and to such undeserving people? They had only the most meager of possessions and lives. Their circumstances, when considered, were heartbreaking. Why are these lives taken and those of the wicked and debauched not? I can think of many more deserving canyons on the face of the earth, where water could cascade and not take out one righteous person.

It is written that angels long to look into the things of salvation, and that is true. But sitting beside that man, wondering what future lay ahead for the boy whose only goal that day was a birthday party, I breathed in the utter despair and anguish and senselessness of humanity. It made me glad that I am not a man.

It also brought a sense of fright to me. Perhaps it was there all along, dormant until this moment when the loss of life and deadly waters brought the submerged to the surface.

Doubt.

I have no lack of faith in the Creator's order; I have seen Him work His plan through the ages, through the wars and rumors of wars. I have seen His love poured out on His people to such an extent that I wanted to taste redemption—for I cannot be redeemed. I believed, in spite of what was before me, that the purpose of the cosmos was still in place, that the sovereign hand of God was still moving and able to create beauty from ashes. But though my belief is built upon nothing less than the sacrifice of the One, there was a moment of doubt.

And I feared that would change everything. Like the flood that swept through these people's lives, I feared this might be used against me and, more frighteningly, against Him.

3

I have heard that your first childhood memory is telling. Mine is a mixture of scents, sounds, and visuals. Of wood smoke and bluegrass and wrinkled hands on a mandolin.

I can see my daddy's black shoes tapping to the beat. Mama says I would sit on the floor and listen to him and his friends play in the evening. Just sit right there in the middle of the hardwood floor with toes tapping and my hands clapping. We lost the picture in the flood, but there was one of me looking up at them with the biggest grin a kid could ever have, listening to the music. “Sally Goodin'” and “Cripple Creek” and “Old Joe Clark.”

That's what is imprinted on my brain: fingers on an old mandolin and people sitting in a circle in hardback chairs tapping on the wood floor and playing music that came from the soul. I believe that's where the music comes from. And it doesn't matter if all those instruments are exactly in tune, but it does help.

You might think that my daddy learned the mandolin from his own daddy or a relative, but it was actually another miner who traded him the instrument for a few of his chickens. From the time I was little, I remember watching his gnarled fingers moving up and down that neck. It was hard for him to get his fingertips in there to play and that's partly the reason why I think he wanted me to learn, so that he could see somebody with smaller fingers do it the way it was meant to be played. He would put his hand on the back of my head or on my shoulder while he was teaching me, and it felt like a warm biscuit back there. My daddy taught me to be a gentle man with such rough hands you could sand plywood with them.

I never really learned to read the notes from the page and transfer that to the instrument. But I did learn the sequence of chords and what strings and frets went with those chord progressions. To me, music is a mathematical equation or a signal flow from the transmitter to the antenna. Daddy taught me to be in the music, to be present with the chord structure and the notes being played by others. In those early days when his friends would come over and he would hand the mandolin to me, it was almost like a bluegrass blues session as his friends presented the musical playground for me and I simply danced and frolicked from note to note. I can still remember the looks on the faces of those miners when I played “Tennessee Waltz” and “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” There are some songs that are just part of you, and I suppose “Amazing Grace” is the other one that not a soul on earth can teach you. You just have to feel it.

Daddy taught me all he could in the years after the flood, but he and I both knew there was only so much he could give to me and that it was something I needed to fly with, like a little bird who is pushed from the nest.

We stayed in Lorado a little while, moving into one of the trailers the government provided. Other people sued the company but not my daddy. They gave him something like $4,000 for everything, and that was all she wrote. He said we were fortunate to get out of there with our lives. The damage had been done to him, though. He already had the black lung, and after the flood it crippled him so that he couldn't walk well. Just kind of hobbled around wherever it was he was going by using a cane.

He finally took the money they gave and left Logan County for good. We moved to a town called Dogwood because some of my mama's kin were there at the time.

We found a place to rent for a good price and moved what little stuff we had inside. Others in the community heard about our plight and gave us some clothes and furniture. Nothing in the house matched, but Mama treated it like a castle, moving an old couch around the living room like it mattered. I can still remember the day we went to Heck's and bought a television. That was a big day.

My daddy would sit out on the porch in a lawn chair somebody gave to us and smoke his Pall Malls and watch cars go by on the interstate, tucked in between the hills like we were. One thing the flood did for us was cause us to take a lot of pictures. I still have photos of my father laughing, though trying not to show his bad teeth. Kind of a half laugh that people of the mountain give you because they are more ashamed of what's behind their lips than they are happy about laughing. There's one of him in that old lawn chair, which would have fallen through with anybody else because all of the slats were rotten, but by then he didn't weigh more than a bird, his body wracked with coughing. He was just a shell of the man I knew when I was little, but he was a survivor.

Dogwood didn't have any coal mines and he didn't have the strength to do much but cough up the black stuff inside his lungs. The only thing he could do with the little breath he had in him was auctioneering. There was an old boy at the feed store who heard he had kind of a talent for it, and he hired him to sell some farm equipment for a family that was going through a hard time. The only problem was my daddy couldn't talk as loud as he needed to, and he worried that he would try too hard and start coughing and that would be the end of his auctioneering.

That year I turned twelve and the more I thought about it, the more I set on a plan to help. One of my cousins was named Elvis and their family didn't have a whole lot more than we did, but he did have this old electric guitar that he'd bring outside and try to play of a night. It was just about the most terrible sound you have ever heard because he didn't know how to tune the thing. I would go over and tune it for him and show him a few chords.

There was also an ancient recorder with a microphone at our schoolhouse, and I knew it wasn't right when I did it, but one Friday I took the microphone and wound the cord around it and stuffed it inside my pocket and took it home. The only problem was, the plug on the end of it was the wrong kind, so I had to strip it off and do the same with Elvis's guitar cord. I got it ready late the night before the auction and took it to my daddy.

I turned the amp on and the speaker hummed and rattled a little until the tubes warmed up. When I plugged in the microphone and held it close to his lips while he talked, his eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. The next day at the feed store, I borrowed a long, black extension cord and plugged it in. That little amp worked like a charm and Daddy did cough a few times, but he got through it all right.

The people whose stuff he auctioned off got a fair price for their equipment, and I guess one of them heard what I had done because after he paid my daddy, the man took me inside and bought me a Zagnut bar and a bottle of grape Nehi. I'll tell you, I was getting to like Dogwood a lot after that. I fixed the microphone cable back up and returned it every weekend after Daddy used it.

Daddy's health didn't improve and pretty soon he was in bed. By then, Mama was working at the beauty shop part-time, and he sat there by himself all day. I felt sorry for him. He wanted to get up out of that bed and throw a ball with me or just go for a walk, but he didn't have the strength.

I remember one Sunday morning before the end, I found him in the kitchen getting his jacket on. It was October and the leaves had started to turn and the ground smelled like an earth pie you could eat.

“Where do you think you're going?” I said.

“Out for a walk; you want to come?”

“Mama's going to kill you.”

He smiled. “Can't kill what you can't catch.”

He handed me his walking stick, the one he had carved all kinds of things in, even part of a Scripture verse that says, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Except some of the words you couldn't read because the letters got knocked off. He grabbed a smaller stick and shook his head. “No, you take that one.”

“I got one; you go ahead and take it.”

He wouldn't hear anything of the sort, so we walked outside on the road and then up into the woods with the trees sporting the most beautiful colored leaves you have ever seen. It was like an explosion had happened at a Glidden factory and all of that paint fell on the trees. It was such a good feeling to have my daddy walking with me, even if he did have to go slow. I thought he was getting better and that this was the first of many walks we'd take.

“One of these days I'm going to buy this hill,” Daddy said. “Such a pretty piece of land.”

“What would you do with it if you had the money?” I said.

He laughed. “Now you're talking like your mama. I'd clear off a spot over there on the side of the hill and build us a nice house. Then I'd clear off the stumps and brush on top and have us a garden that would feed the whole town for three winters in a row. Maybe even raise some cattle and pigs and chickens.”

“I don't like chickens.”

“And why is that?”

“They wake me up. When we lived back on the creek, they'd get me up every day.”

Something happened when I mentioned our old place and I wished I hadn't. Just saying things that spark a memory will do that. He sat down on an old stump and leaned on his stick. I offered him mine, but he waved me off.

“There's something I need to tell you. Something I haven't told anybody. Not even your mama.”

I knelt in the wet leaves. Looking back on it, I think he was inviting me in, knowing that time was short.

“What is it?”

He took out a cigarette and put it between his lips, leaving it unlit. “Those two little girls at the house, the ones I carried—they died because of me.”

“That's not true.”