Long Way Gone (8 page)

W
hen I was growing up, Dad never talked much about my mom. It wasn't that he didn't want to. I think it just hurt too much. He told me they met in a bar where he was playing and she was waiting tables. Over the weeks she quit serving him beer because she fell in love with his voice and said it was too pure to be poisoning with so much alcohol.

What she didn't know was that he was ordering the beer to get her to come around. Problem was, he didn't like the taste, so whenever she walked away he poured the beer between the slats of the deck beneath his feet. Dad said he was glad when she put her foot down because he preferred coffee, and given that refills were free, he saw more of her that way.

Finally, one night she set down the coffeepot. “Why don't you just ask me out? No person on earth drinks this much coffee.”

He said that was good too, 'cause he was peeing every five minutes.

He said when they got pregnant with me, he used to sing to my mom's stomach at night. Press his lips to her skin. Sing “Jesus Loves Me” or any number of old hymns. I'd be lying if I said I could remember it, but I do have a vague awareness that I heard singing before I heard language. I think that's why I sang before I talked. I carried a tune before I said
Momma
or
Dada
or
truck
. When I did speak, to my father's great delight my first word was
Jimmy
.

Jimmy was a wedding present given to my father by my mother. It
cost her a year's worth of tips. A Martin D-28. If you're a guitar person, you don't need an explanation. If you're not, it's simple. The D-28 is the guitar by which all others are judged. Period. Whether you know it or not, when you think
guitar
, you're thinking of a D-28. Given both its history and its pedigree, Jimmy was always the most valuable thing in our house.

As a result, I grew up in a house where music and singing were as natural as breathing. Asking me to imagine life without music was like asking a fish to consider life without water. When I was not quite a year old, my father would sit me on his knee and teach me licks. Baby food in one hand, pick in the other. No, I don't remember it, nor did I really understand it, but something in my brain did. Like his singing to Mom's stomach, those early lessons formed a pathway in my brain where I began to perceive and ingest the world, my surroundings, what I felt, through music. Dad says I was making chords on a ukulele before I could walk. I don't have very many memories of my mom, and I can't see her face except in pictures, but sometimes I can hear her singing. Dad said her voice just melted him, and the closest thing to it that he ever heard was my voice as a kid.

Our cabin sat at almost thirteen thousand feet. Perched on a shoulder near the top of a mountain. At times that made it difficult both to get to and get out of. Few folks had ever been up this high. Even the old silver and ore miners didn't think the land was worth the hassle. Given that nobody else wanted it, Mom and Dad were able to buy it.

This wouldn't mean much until years later. While it was true that the land wasn't valuable, it turned out that the water rights were. And water we had aplenty. That might not sound like much of a benefit, but in Colorado people kill each other over water rights. And given that we owned the mountain, including the top and any source or spring inside, no one had rights to that water other than us.

One of the things that attracted my mother to my father was his occupation. He was a tent preacher. He dabbled with prospecting when we were home, but the thing he “did” was preach. His revival show was
popular in and around Colorado, so we traveled a lot. It wasn't that he didn't believe in brick-and-mortar churches, he just felt more at home in a church without walls. His style brought folks from every kind of background, including many who wouldn't feel comfortable in a steeple-church, under one tent. Tattooed bikers sitting next to hippies who hadn't bathed in a year next to a man in a ten-gallon hat next to a man singing Motown next to a woman with her dress to her ankles and her hair up in a beehive. They saw it all. I grew up in it, so it seemed normal to me then. Now I think we must have looked more like a circus than a church.

When I turned three, Dad started getting calls from churches in nearby states, Texas or New Mexico, so we would load up on Wednesday or Thursday and drive all night en route to a Friday night through Sunday morning revival. Sometimes Sunday morning would stretch into Sunday afternoon or evening, so by the time he got the tents torn down and chairs stacked and piano loaded up, we'd get home on Tuesday only to leave again on Thursday. Dad was a big man, but doing all this loading and unloading by himself was more than he could handle. Then he happened upon Big Ivory Johnson.

Because revivals occur mostly at night, Dad spent a lot of daytime hours in the small towns where he preached, drumming up interest. He'd eat in the local diner, hamming it up with the waitresses; he'd get a shave in the local barbershop; he'd do a load of laundry at the Laundromat; and, given that the residents were a rather captive audience, he'd take his message to local prisons. That's where he met Big Ivory, who was serving a five-year sentence for assault—which, given his size, must have been easy to do. Big Ivory was about six feet six inches tall, probably weighed close to two hundred and eighty pounds, and while his teeth were the color of ivory, his skin was coffee black. He said when he got out, Dad was the only guy of any color who offered him a job.

Dad had been waiting on Big-Big when he walked out of prison. The way Big-Big tells it, Dad rolled down the window of his bus and said, “You hungry?”

Big-Big said, “I looked at this white man and thought,
He crazy
. But my stomach be growling.” Their friendship started at breakfast.

I had trouble saying
Ivory
, so I just called him Big-Big. From that day on, I don't remember the bus leaving without Big-Big either driving or navigating.

I was four when Mom died. All I remember is that she got sick and then she was gone. Big-Big had worked for my dad almost a year by then. Folks came from all over for the funeral, and the procession was more than a mile long. They buried her beneath the aspens because she loved to hear the wind through the leaves, and Big-Big helped lower her casket down into the earth.

If my father ever had a crisis of faith, it was as he kept watch by the fever-riddled, emaciated body of my sweating, delirious mother. Big-Big told me later that her dying really shook him. Said he'd never seen a man cry like that. Said Dad was a tent peg for a lot of people, but she was his. As was I. Which explained my nickname. Peg. Like Big-Big, it stuck. Folks been calling me Peg ever since.

After the funeral Dad took me by the hand, tears draining out his eyes, and said, “Would you mind not singing for a little while?” It took me some time to understand why. During the next year, Dad didn't talk much. We moved up into the mountains and he walked the aspens with Jimmy, playing. He would try to sing, but most times the words wouldn't come or when they did, only in fits. Sometimes he'd pan the creek for gold. Just stare for hours into the plate for any sign of color. I think he was looking less for gold and more for Mom's reflection.

Since I had a good bit of free time, my playground became the mountain. Dad would cut me loose after chores. “Don't get beyond the sound of my whistle.” That gave me a lot of room to roam.

Late in the evening, when the breeze picked up, he'd walk through the aspens with his hands raised. Then he'd come back with red, puffy
eyes. One evening he waved his hands across the aspen grove, brilliant with crimson red and yellow. He said, “We see hundreds of trees. Thousands, even. But underground their roots are connected, making all this one giant organism.” He paused. “If one tree gets sick, the whole grove gets sick.”

The following year we returned to the revival circuit, and by the age of six I was spending more nights in the back of the flatbed than at home. Dad preached. Big-Big played piano. The older I got, the more I realized that while my dad was a big man, Big-Big was Dad times two. Given the size of both men and the striking difference in the color of their skin, I began to guess that some people came just to see what all the fuss was about.

One of the perks of a large stature was a barrel chest and booming baritone with enough volume to carry between mountain ranges. Dad seldom used a microphone. Big-Big had bear paws for hands and his fingers were the size of sausages, but he could light up a piano. I still don't understand how he made the chords without double-punching every other key. I used to sit and watch his fingers glide across the keyboard. Often the church we were visiting would lend their choir to fill in where Mom had left off and add a much-needed female voice.

Whenever we returned home, Dad would unload and then hike up through the aspens. After several minutes, his voice would echo back to me. Always the same song. While my ears may have heard the melody and my mind may have understood the words, it was my heart that got pulled on. It was a lament. A song of loss. I guess Dad could sing it with such emotive clarity because he'd known such emotional pain.

One night when he returned, eyes red and wet, I asked him, “Dad, what's that song?”

He poured himself some coffee and we sat on the porch, where he propped his feet up on the railing. Colorado stretched out before us. I could see west for nearly two hundred miles.

Dad was quiet several minutes. “Somewhere in the sixteenth or seventeenth century,” he began, “a blind harpist named O'Cahan wrote
that tune. It survived two hundred years until an itinerant fiddler played it one night on the streets of England. History does not record the fiddler's name, but a music collector named Jane Ross heard and transcribed the tune and published it. Called it ‘O'Cahan's Lament.' The tune lay dormant awhile until some folks named Weatherly came from England to these very mountains looking for silver.” Dad waved his hand across the landscape.

“Most, if not all, of the silver rush occurred within eyesight of where you now sit, so I like to think that what happened next had something to do with these hills. Your mom certainly thought so.” Dad sipped his coffee. “Things get a bit complicated here, but an Irish-American woman named Jess Weatherly played the tune for her brother-in-law Fred, who was something of a songwriter. Turns out that over the course of his life he wrote and published some fifteen hundred songs. He'd written a song some years prior but had never attached the right melody to the words. Somewhere around 1911 or 1912, Jess played that tune for Fred. He reshaped the lyrics he'd written to fit the tune and published the song you hear me singing.”

We watched in silence as clouds filtered through the mountaintops.

“In my limited education, it's probably the best ballad ever written. There's something that happens in the rise and fall of the melody that speaks to us on a level that's deeper than our thinking. It was sung at President Kennedy's funeral and has been recorded by everyone from Judy Garland and Bing Crosby to the Man in Black.” Dad smiled. “Elvis said he thought it'd been written by angels and asked for it to be played at his funeral. You probably don't remember this, but the night your mom died, she asked me to lay you next to her in the hospital bed. She wrapped her arm around you and sang it to you while you went to sleep in her arms.” Dad stopped. He was quiet a long while. “I sat next to the bed and tried to listen.” He motioned to the aspens. “So sometimes . . . I go there to remember.”

I waited a minute or two before I asked, “Will you teach it to me?”

Dad nodded slowly.

“You want me to get Jimmy?”

“Jimmy stays quiet on this one.” Dad set down his cup, cleared his throat, and tried to sing, but something choked out the words. “This might be tougher than I thought.” He tried again, and this time the words came.

“O Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling . . .”

Over the years, we sang that song together a hundred times. It was ours. We made it so. It was our way of honoring Mom and of sharing a memory without ever having to talk about it. It was how we acknowledged and waded through the pain without being crippled by it. “Danny Boy” was the song that taught me what songs can do. That music heals us from the inside out.

That night he finished the story as he sat on my bed, tucking me in. “No credit was ever given to Jess Weatherly. She died penniless in 1939, while Fred enjoyed both fame and wealth.”

I couldn't understand why someone would do that, and Dad picked up on my distress. “Songs outlive us,” he said. “They're supposed to. We write them in order to give them away, but”—he smiled and tapped me in the chest—“just be careful who you give them to.”