The Night Listener and Others

by Chet Williamson

  And he takes this big old pause like he’s waiting for a drumbeat, and I say, “Until what?”

  And then he says he found the original aluminum disc Roger Waitkus made back in nineteen-thirty-something. “I heard the tape transcriptions dozens of times,” Pete says, “but there was more on the disc.”

  “More of the song?” I asked. I’m getting a little excited now myself.

  “No,” he says, “just talk. I put it on a DAT. You got a machine?”

  Of course I got a DAT, so he sticks it in there and I hear his grandpa’s voice, and it’s saying, close as I can recall, “Now, Mrs. Echols, it’s very important that you sing the entire song for me. This is an important historical document,” and he’s going on like that for a while, really pressing this woman, and then it gets to back and forth.

  He says, “Well, why can’t you sing it for me?”

  And she says, “It ain’t mine to sing.”

  And he says, “Well, whose is it?”

  And she says, “The family. Ask them.”

  And he says, “What family?”

  And she says, “You know.”

  And he says, “No I don’t.”

  And she says, “Yes you do, and that’s all I’m a-sayin’.”

  And she says nothing and he says nothing and then Pete stops the tape. And I say, “That’s clear as mud.”

  “No, she was right,” Pete says. “My grandpa knew it but he didn’t realize it. She’d sung it for him. The answer was right there in the lyrics.” And Pete tells me to listen, and he rewinds the tape and plays the beginning:

  I come from a lovin’ family

  That lives where the two creeks meet.

  At least that’s what I hear. It’s tough, because the old lady is singing kind of screechy, and the recording is crap, all full of hiss and other junk.

  Pete turns it off and asks me what she sang. I tell him what I heard and he shakes his head no. “She didn’t say ‘a lovin’,” he says. “You heard her dialect, she’d have pronounced it ‘luhvin’, but instead she sings almost a long O like ‘loavin.’ And listen to the word before too.”

  So he plays it again, and damned if it doesn’t sound like “loavin,” and in front of what I thought was A, I can just barely hear, over all the noise, a TH sound.

  “What did you hear?” Pete asks.

  “The loavin’ family?” I say, feeling stupid. “What the hell’s that, folks that make loaves of bread?”

  “The L-O-V-I-N family,” he spells out. “Spelled like lovin’, but pronounced loavin. It’s a name. Not a common one in the Appalachians, but a real one. Louvin is another version of it, like the Louvin Brothers?”

  I nod my head. I’ve met Charlie Louvin—mighty nice man, though I hear his brother Ira was mean as a gutshot snake.

  Then Pete tells me he’s gone online and checked the records for the county where Bertha Echols lived, and there was a Lovin family who lived there around 1935, when Roger Waitkus made that recording, but Pete couldn’t find anything about them after that.

  So I asked him, “What are you sayin’? That this family’s got the last verse to the song?”

  “Why not?” he says. “That stuff gets handed down, and after all it’s their song. If anybody’d have it, one of the Lovins would.”

  So I ask if he can’t find any modern records about them, what makes him think there’s still any Lovins left. And he says there’s still places up in the mountains where the census takers don’t even go, still folks who don’t pay taxes or social security, still people the government don’t even know exist, and if they do they couldn’t care less, since they don’t have any money to pay taxes anyway.

  Well, it all sounds kind of dubious to me, and he can see it in my face, but then he starts pitching me. “Think about it, Billy,” he says. “Think about the singer who introduces that last verse to the public. Think about TV appearances, think about record sales. Boy, this is the closest anybody’s ever come to finding this verse—and maybe the real story of the Lovins beside. I always liked you, always liked your singing, always liked your company…so why don’t you come with me?”

  I thought maybe there was more to it than that. Pete’s sort of a pipsqueak, and I figured he didn’t like the thought of going up into those mountains alone. Me, I’m a pretty big guy, and I got a nice collection of pistols, which is two good reasons for wanting me to come along. It was probably a wild goose chase, but hell, I didn’t have to start touring for another two weeks, and if we did find that verse, well, he was right about the publicity, and I could use it. If you ain’t been in O Brother, Where Art Thou, bluegrass is still the poor cousin in the music business.

  So I say sure and Pete says great, but don’t tell a soul. He doesn’t want anybody else knowing about this, which is fine with me.

  Next day, six o’clock in the morning, God help me, I drive my car over to his place, park it in his garage, and we go off in his RV. It’s a nice one, with a toilet and big bunks, just in case we got to spend a night or two someplace where there are no motels. Pete lives alone too, so nobody knows what we’re doing except us.

  We drive east about four hours into North Carolina, just stopping once to take a leak and get some Krispy Kremes, then up into the Smokies, and we go to this town where Bertha Echols lived. I stay in the RV, behind the tinted windows, and let Pete talk to the people, because they might recognize me and we’re keeping a low profile. He checks first at the post office, this little building not much bigger than an outhouse, but they tell him there’s no such family living around there.

  So he comes back and tells me this, and says he’s gonna poke around town and I say fine, so I read some magazines while he’s poking. Around one o’clock he comes back and says he’s talked to dang near every old fart in the village, and nobody knows a thing. Never heard of no Lovins around here, they say. Closest Pete gets to anything is one old black man who says there used to be Lovins living years ago way up in the hills. The old place might be there, but nobody’d be alive now.

  That’s good enough for Pete. I tell him that if there’s nobody alive up there then there’s nobody to sing any damn songs, but he’s like a kid in a candy store. He pulls out these, whaddyacallem, topographical maps with all the mountains and streams on them, and starts looking, and I ask what he’s looking for, and he says, “Like in the song—’I come from the Lovin family that lives where the two creeks meet.’”

  “Jesus,” I say, “where the hell don’t two creeks meet?” But he kept looking and narrowed it down to four places he thought there could be a cabin. I said, “Pete, look at all those streams and creeks up there, and all the places they meet! Must be a hundred. How can you say these four are the right ones?” Well, he mumbled something about “cultural geography” or some such B.S., and I thought hell, it’s his dime.

  So we start up into the mountains and it isn’t long before we’re on dirt roads, and with the dirt roads come the ruts and the limbs fallen down over the road, and since I’m the big guy and Pete’s driving, I’m the one got to get out and move them. Even with the crappy roads, it’s pretty up there. Spring’s come, and the trees are greening and there are wildflowers all over. We see a few deer now and again, some rabbits, birds taking dust baths in the dirt, and none of them seem very scared of us, almost like it’s annoying that they got to get out of the road.

  We get near this one place, so we park and walk through the woods—Pete’s got himself a compass—and soon we find a place two creeks meet. I see now what Pete meant. There’s a little open area at the base of a bluff, a good place for a cabin, but there isn’t one there, not even a foundation, so we go back and drive on.

  Next place it’s the same thing. Pretty site, but nothing there. It’s getting kind of late now, and I tell Pete we oughta head back, but he says just one more. So we go another ten or so windy miles of rotten road. At least this site’s closer to where we park, about a hundred yards through the trees. And son of a bitch if we don’t see a cabi
n there, nestled right sweet in this little hollow, just like a cover painting on one of those Songs of the Mountains CDs. A few outbuildings are near fallen down, and next to one of them is a pole about eight foot long and six foot in the air, its ends stuck in the forks of two trees, and I think all it needs is a swing hanging from it.

  Only thing is, nobody’s been swinging there in years, far as I can see. The cabin’s door is wide open, and most all the glass has fell out of the windows. The chinking between the logs is out in a lot of places too, so you can look right inside between the cracks.

  Still, Pete’s jumping around like he found King Tut’s tomb or something. He goes to the door and actually says, “Hello?” like somebody’s gonna answer him, like the whole Lovin clan is just gonna come out on the porch with banjos and guitars and mandolins and sing him their song.

  “Nobody here, Pete,” I say. “Nobody been here for a good number of years.” I push on past him and go inside. It’s a shit pile. Everything’s dusty and smells old and moldy. There’s still some furniture, awful worse for wear, a big old square table with five spindly wooden chairs, all of them homemade, but not good homemade, not like antiques. More like crap wood just thrown together with cheap nails. There are another couple chairs, just as ugly, by a fireplace. There’s an old iron cookstove, there’s a cupboard the shelves have all fell out of, and there’s what’s left of a rope bed at the back of the room, ropes all tore and hanging down. I see a torn cord and what’s left of a cloth curtain on the floor that might’ve made the bedroom a little more private.

  There’s a ladder along the side wall that goes up into the attic, and I figure kids must’ve slept up there, but the wood’s all dry and rotten, so I’m not gonna risk it. “So,” I say to Pete, “you think this is the Lovin mansion?”

  He nods, like it’s the greatest place he’s ever seen. “Sure of it,” he says, and he heads for the ladder.

  “Whoa, hoss,” I tell him. “That don’t look any too safe to me. Besides, it’s gettin’ dark. Let’s wait till morning to look for the hidden gold, okay?”

  “You mean it?” he says. “We can stay here tonight?”

  “Not here,” I say, “but in the RV, sure. You brought stuff to cook, right?” Because by now I’m getting real hungry.

  He says he did, so we go back to the RV, and it is getting dark, and we trip over some roots but we make it okay. Pete’s got some burgers in the fridge that we fry up, and we have a couple of beers. I try to calm him down a little, tell him that even if this is the old Lovin place we ain’t gonna find shit, but he doesn’t seem to care.

  After we eat, he asks me if I’d sing the song for him, what there is of it, and he’s got a little Martin Backpacker guitar, so I do, and he sits there grinning like a kid. I sing a few more songs, but I’m feeling pretty tired after getting up so early, so we open the RV windows, since it’s a little stuffy, and crawl into our bunks and turn off the lights. It’s dark and quiet, just the sound of bugs chirping, and I fall asleep as quick as that.

  When I wake up it’s still dark, and at first I think what I hear is an animal yowling, like a cat in heat. But as I get more awake I realize it’s a human voice, and it’s singing, and it’s just awful, God, like nails on a chalkboard. I sit up and listen, and damned if I can’t make out “‘who wooed me with words so sweet.’”

  I get out of the bunk and call Pete’s name, but there’s no answer. I feel around his bunk, but he’s not there. Well, I don’t know what the hell is going on, so I grab a flashlight from where I saw Pete put one, and I turn it on and open the little case I brought along and I get out a .38 revolver I’d brought and I shove it down the front of my pants, reminding myself not to blow my balls off.

  That might seem a little extreme, but we’re out there in the middle of nowhere and Pete’s gone, and I don’t know who the hell else is up in these hills. So I go outside and I don’t need the light, because the full moon’s come up over the horizon and it’s plenty bright to see where I’m walking, even with all the trees around.

  I get closer to the cabin and see there’s lights on inside. The voice is still singing—it’s up to the part now where they find the dead girl by the creek, and that voice is so weird I gotta look down at the creek to make sure there isn’t a body lying there. Funny thing—even though I got closer to the cabin the voice didn’t seem to get any louder. It was like I was hearing it inside myself, like distance didn’t have anything to do with it.

  When I got to the cabin I didn’t go in the door, but went around to the window instead and just raised my head up over the bottom of the sill. I damn near pissed myself. Pete was in there sitting on that dirty floor, in all the dust and the mouse turds, and sitting right next to him was the ugliest old woman I’ve ever seen. I don’t have much of a gift for words outside of songs, but believe you me, I wouldn’t write any kind of song about that woman. She was like somebody dug her up and barely squirted some juice into her old dry skin. Her hair was dirty gray-yellow, like week-old snow in the gutter, and her eyes were these little black beads that honed into Pete like a hawk on a baby rabbit. There were more lines on her face than there were on Pete’s maps. How ugly was she? Think of the worst thing you can and go a hundred more miles. Then keep driving.

  After that first glimpse, I shot my head back down again. Christ knows I didn’t want her looking at me the way she was at Pete. There were plenty of chinks in the wall, and I found one to look through. I felt safer then, though I really didn’t know why that old woman scared me so much. I’d find out. I saw that the light in the cabin was from a few candles, but everything else was the same, and I wondered where the hell that old woman had been keeping herself—up in the attic maybe, or could be there was a cellar with a trap door we hadn’t noticed.

  By then she was singing the fourth verse, that short one about the gal feeling guilty, and then the chorus. When she stopped, Pete said, “My God, that was beautiful. I’ve heard that song sung hundreds of times, but never like that.”

  I thought maybe he was putting her on, because I’d never heard it sung like that neither. But he sounded sincere as could be, and he told her that her voice sounded wonderful. I could see him looking at her like she was an angel, and I wondered what the hell was wrong with him. And then he answered my question for me, or at least I thought.

  “Would you sing me the rest?” he says. Bingo, I think to myself—that’s why he’s being so sweet to her. He thinks she’s a Lovin. He’s after the goddam song, that’s all, and if it means telling a crazy old lady she looks like an angel and sings like a bird, old Pete’ll be taping feathers to her arms if he has to.

  The old woman doesn’t say a thing at first. She just touches his face with those fingers like old bent twigs, and I wonder how Pete keeps from shuddering. Then she leans in that wrinkled old road map of a face and whispers something in his ear. I can’t hear the words, but it sounds like paper scraping on a two-day growth of beard.

  Then Pete nods and be damn if he doesn’t touch her face, lets his fingers trail down her cheek and move over to her lips and then, Jesus Harvey Christ, he kisses her. And I don’t mean like you kiss your Grandma. He lays it right on her, open mouthed, and I see something kind of fat and black that I think is maybe her tongue, and man, that’s all I want to see. I look down and take a few deep breaths, thinking about the lengths that people will go to to get what they want, and hoping I never get that desperate.

  After I don’t know how long I look back up, and now, good God, it’s even worse. I mean, he’s doin’ her, right there on the floor. They got their clothes off and he’s on top of her, and I never saw anything like that in my life, it looked like he was trying to screw that thing in the basement in those Evil Dead movies. I near to puked, and I looked away again but I still heard them, Pete panting like he was, I don’t know, in the throes of ecstasy, and that old woman just grunting like a pig, louder and louder till it seemed like something busted inside her, and she let out this howl like some crazy monk
ey with its tail on fire.

  It got quiet then, and I looked through the chink. They were both lying there, and it wasn’t pretty, and I started thinking about what an absolute whore Pete Waitkus was, and I’da bet dollars to donuts that Alan Lomax never would’ve done nothing like that for a lousy song.

  It was almost like Pete heard me thinking, bringing him back to square one, because he said, “Now…now will you sing for me?”

  And she did. She started with that shortened fourth verse, and I’m not gonna try and sound like her because there’s no way, but it was all high and airy, not as screechy as before, but just plain spooky…

  I begged him to go and save his dear life,

  But alas he would not flee.

  With the moon in the sky they hung him on high,

  And the guilt sat hard on me.

  She paused for a second, and I thought, oh shit, that’s all. She screwed Pete twice tonight. But then she went on, and it was the money shot…

  For I had slain that maiden fair

  With my love’s knife cold and straight,

  In hope he would run toward the rising sun

  And escape the Lovin fate.

  Damn me, yes. We were getting there, all right. Nobody’d ever heard that one before. She started on the chorus…

  Mother come quickly, Father come quickly.…

  Then I heard a rustling, shuffling kind of sound that seemed to be outside with me, and when I turned my head I froze. Up toward the front of the cabin there were some people walking. I counted four shapes in the moonlight, one after another. They were moving slow, but like they knew where they were headed…

  Brother and Sister, see…

  The two shorter ones had on long skirts, and the two tall ones were wearing pants, so I figured two men and two women, but when they went through the door and I saw them in the candlelight they could’ve been anything. What was left of their hair was long and straggly, and if the old woman on the floor was a little long in the tooth, then these four had already had the worms at them. And that’s not just a figure of speech.