Long Way Gone (25 page)

My tapping and fingerpicking brought five thousand to their singing-whistling-clapping-shouting feet. I walked forward slowly, remembering how Dad had done it. Taking his time. Weaving around people. One spotlight framed Daley on the stage. The other shone on me. As I walked closer to the front, the choir started humming. Then I heard the piano bleed in. Big-Big's timing, his touch. His sausage-size fingers were playing a melody around me. The effect of that tapestry was all encompassing. But while there was beauty in it, it held little glory, and no majesty, until Daley opened her mouth and let her words rain down.

I climbed the stage. Mesmerized. One side of me played. The other side watched her empty herself. The smile on her face was the final expression of an emotion that enveloped her entire body. Every muscle, impulse, heartbeat had a singular focus—the song erupting out of her. As my fingers played the chords and picked the strings, the floodgates inside me opened and began letting out the song I'd held back for twenty years.

A
n hour in, Daley paused long enough to take a breath, and a natural break occurred in the set. Out of the lull some guy yelled, “ ‘Son of a Preacher Man.' ”

Daley looked at me and shrugged. “I'm game.”

I stared from the stage to the venue the Falls had become—the place my father built. “I think Dad would be okay with that,” I said aloud to myself.

“What'd you say?” Daley asked.

“I said, ‘You're beautiful.' ”

The voice in the audience had sounded familiar. I scanned the front row and found a guy in a hoodie. He was sipping on a soda, eating a hot dog, and his feet were propped up on the stage. Close enough for me to catch a whiff of the dog. The smell was familiar . . . cabbage and some nasty-smelling cheese.

I leaned down. Blondie looked up at me from beneath the hood. I said, “That was you?”

No response.

“But I thought you said you weren't in Nashville.”

He took another bite, smearing mustard across the corner of his mouth. “Never said that.”

“You did too.” I pointed to the back of the audience. “You just said—”

“I said, ‘What makes you think I left?' ”

“Exactly.”

“Cooper, I wasn't talking about a place.”

I scratched my head. “Then what were you talking about?”

“I wasn't talking about a what or a where. I was talking about a
who
.”

I was about as confused as I could be. “You are making no sense whatsoever.”

He took another bite and hopped up onstage. He brushed past me and whispered, “Some have entertained . . .” Then he sat atop the piano just behind me, opened his pocketknife, and began whittling. “Therefore since we are surrounded . . .”

I shrugged. “I've heard this one before. Lots of times.”

He stopped whittling and tapped me on the edge of my ear with the tip of his pocketknife.

“You might have heard it, but were you listening?”

In a matter of seconds, Blondie's face transformed to look like the old man in Dietrich's Wiener schnitzel car wash, then the policeman who woke me in the street after I was mugged and Jimmy was stolen, then the bouncer in Printer's Alley who gave me the sheet music denoting the Nashville Number System, and finally to the little kid with his father in Leadville who asked for my autograph.

He leaned close enough for me to feel his breath on my face. “What makes you think I left you?”

“You were with me all along?”

“Don't let it go to your head. You're not any more important than anyone else, but the gift in you . . . well, that's another thing entirely.”

“Do you talk this way to everyone?”

“How's that?”

“So flippantly.”

“What makes you think I talk to anyone else?”

“But you just said I'm not special.”

He shook his head. “Never said that.”

“Yes you did.”

“Nope. I said you weren't any more important than anyone else.”

“Same thing.”

“No. It's not.”

I stepped closer. My face inches from his. I spoke through gritted teeth. “Why are you here?”

He smiled, stood, and took off his sweatshirt. “It's about time you asked that question.”

I was about to object when Daley started singing in that raspy, powerful voice that would melt most men in the audience. She further grabbed my attention when she inserted my name in the first line. It was true. I was, in fact, the son of a preacher man, and by her own admission I'd been the only one to “reach” her. Just before the last chorus, she leaned across the guitar and kissed me beneath the spotlight. I don't know who loved it more, the audience or me. From there we played a mixture of covers and her own stuff. Or, I should say,
our
own stuff. We sat on stools and accepted requests while Blondie sat on the piano and whittled.

During a lull I pointed at the pile of wood shavings at his feet. “Nice mess.”

He eyed the pile beneath him. “It's not nearly as bad as the one you made.”

“Touché. But do you have to do that right now, right here?”

He hesitated. “When I'm not babysitting you, my day job is instrument repair. Lately you've required a lot of my time, so I'm behind.”

“Really?”

He nodded matter-of-factly.

“What's that you're working on?”

He held up the piece of wood in his hand. “When finished, it'll be the neck and headstock to a guitar.”

Evidently I'd entered an area he didn't mind talking about. His work.

“It's a custom fit. Rather time-consuming. I take some measurements, then do some hand-fitting to make sure it works perfectly with the player's hands.” He lifted it so I could see it. “This one happens to belong to your dad.”

“You talk to my dad?”

His face was expressionless. “All the time.”

“Can you tell him something for me?”

“Yes, I can, but no, I will not.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you're not real accommodating?”

He never looked up from his work. “Accommodating you is not my job.”

“Well, you have a unique way of determining what is your job.”

He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. His look was one of tolerance but not necessarily interest.

I tried again. “Will you please tell him something for me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He pointed at the audience with his knife. “Tell him yourself.” As he said that, something in my vision changed. It was like sitting in the optometrist's chair, and the doc is flipping those lenses in front of your eye and asking which one is better, one or two? And as you answer, the picture gets sharper and sharper until everything clicks into focus.

In front of me, I saw the audience that had bought their tickets. Those folks, like me, had come in through the gate. And then in a blink, the image went from one to two—and five thousand turned into more than I could count or guesstimate. And standing near the front, with a guitar slung over his shoulder, smiling wide and eyes intent on me, stood my dad.

I had not expected that.

Daley and I were sitting on stools, near the edge of the stage. Turned slightly toward each other and facing the audience. She smiled and put her hand on my knee, proving once again that she, like my mother, was a touchy-feely person. Her eyes smiled with as much mischief as her mouth. She turned toward the audience.

“Coop won't tell you this, but he's written eighteen number one hits. Five of which were mine.” She turned to me and raised an eyebrow. “You have anything new you'd like to share with us?”

I muted the strings and spoke into the microphone. “Twenty-five
years ago this month, I stood on this stage with my dad, and in my infinite stupidity and ignorance, I told him I wasn't going to sing his stupid songs anymore, or travel with his stupid tent revival circus, or do pretty much anything he wanted. Then . . . I balled my fist and struck my father in the face. Hard as I could. Split his lip. The same father who had loved me really well and never withheld any good thing.”

The audience responded with silence.

I walked a few steps to where my dad had been standing. “And while he stood right here, bleeding onto the stage, I took off the ring he'd given me and threw it—along with my identity—as far as I could into the river.”

The silence of the crowd allowed the peaceful roll of the river to flow over us.

“Adding insult to injury, I stole everything he valued, including his life savings, his truck, and the guitar my mom gave him as a wedding gift.”

If I did not have their attention before, I had it now.

The next admission was the most painful. My voice cracked. “I never saw my dad alive again.”

The entire audience came to a halt. Even the folks walking to and from the bathroom or concession stood still.

“That night I drove to Nashville, where I learned I was really nothing special and I promptly lost everything I'd stolen. Money, truck, guitar, everything. Five years later I was shot in the chest and left to die in a building set on fire. For twenty years I have not known who pulled me from the flames. Until a few minutes ago.”

I held up the letter my dad had written me. “It was my dad. I don't know how he found me, but he did. He rescued me when I could not. I'd like to tell you the story has a happy ending, but . . . the price for my trip out of the flames was high. Dad died from burns to his body and the toxic effects of smoke in his lungs.”

The expressions on people's faces had eclipsed pity. It was more akin to understanding. To empathy. They were wiping tears. Intently listening. And what I saw for the first time was not only the impact of my
story on others but how it resonated with their own. While their details were different, a lot of those folks staring up at me shared the same hurt, the same regret, same heartache, and somehow, in hearing the truth about me, they learned they weren't alone. That they weren't the only one to walk away from someone they loved, and who loved them.

I gathered myself. “When I left here, I didn't just take my dad's stuff. I took me. My most selfish act. And that hurt him the most.”

I walked to the edge of the stage. My fingers rolling gently across the strings. “For twenty years I've been trying to figure out how to tell a dead man I'm sorry. Sometimes I climb up in those hills behind us and stare out there and ask God why He keeps me around. Why not just be done with me? Zap me with a lightning bolt and be done with it. And then I hear a song. And I know that what I'm hearing doesn't start with me. It can't. There is no way on this earth that something so beautiful can come out of something so screwed up. So black-hearted. But somehow it does, and because it's beautiful and I don't want to lose it, and because there is still a part of me that would like to share it, I write it down.” I shook my head as the tears dripped off my chin. I wiped my face. “So here I am at the end of myself, asking just what do I do with the music in me?”

Big-Big quietly played chords on the piano. The choir hummed. Daley swayed beside me. The collective voice of the choir grew louder over my shoulder. Blondie and his friends had moved closer to the stage. I turned, and my dad was standing next to me. I slid the notebook from the small of my back, opened it, and handed it to Daley. Slowly I raised both hands as high as I could reach. A mirror image of my father.

“This is a song . . .” My voice cracked. “This is a song . . . about what I hope to find when I get where I'm going.” I played the opening chord. “It's called ‘Long Way Gone.' ”

So I played. And for the first time since I left this stage, I sang at the top of my lungs.

Somewhere in the first verse, Daley's voice rose beneath me. And then showered over me.

When I finished I rolled into a song everyone already knew, and by
the time I sang the second line, “Tune my heart to sing Thy grace,” they were singing back at me at the top of their lungs.

We sang all six verses, and reaching the last verse, we muted all the instruments and sang a capella.

“Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it
Prone to leave the God I love
Here's my heart, Lord, take and seal it
Seal it for Thy courts above.”

When we finished, people were leaving their seats and moving forward. Crowding the stage. Ten thousand hands waved in the air. It was a good song. Daley would go far with it. I think my dad would have liked it, and he was right, there's just something about old hymns.

The world seemed muted. My heartbeat was in my ears. The acrid taste had returned. I had pushed it too far. I felt the rupture and knew no river treatment would help. I only had a few moments.

Blondie stood off to my left. Close to Daley. A cat ready to pounce. My dad stood nearby, playing alongside me. If I was going to die onstage, I wanted to die with a guitar in my hand. Playing. I put the capo on the fifth fret and started strumming a G-D-Em-C chord progression. The words were muddled, and I could tell the audience knew something was off. I tried to sing the first verse but all the words got jumbled and I lost the tune. The world took on a sepia color and everything moved in slow motion.

Daley stared at me. A wrinkle between her eyes. Big-Big stood from the piano and stepped toward me. When the blood spilled out my mouth, I remember looking upward, then falling backward, and the only thing I could hear was a million voices singing over me.

I watched me from above me. It was quiet up here. Chaos below. I lay on the stage. Motionless. Eyes growing dim. There was a good bit of blood.
Daley was screaming. Her guitar had been sprayed red. I felt bad about that. She was holding me. Her shirt was stained.

Big-Big was leaning over, crying. Shaking his head. I heard him screaming, “No,” real loud. He looked angry. And he too looked like he was talking to someone who wasn't there. Then I saw him pick up my body and carry me off the back of the stage toward the waterfall. He walked my limp rag-doll body across the pasture into the darkness, away from the lights, and waded into the river where the water rose above his waist. Walking upstream. Finally he just stood there in the falls, letting the water rain down on him and me both. Washing over us. I could see his chest heaving. Letting out deep moans. Screaming at the sky. His voice seemed a long way away. He was saying, “I told you I'd look after him and I ain't done real good.”