by Stephen King
He said, “If you go up the road from Longmeadow, you come to the Goat Mountain Resort gatehouse . . .”
“. . . where they won’t let you in unless you’re a member or a guest.”
“Right. The class system at work. But just before you get to the gatehouse, there’s a gravel road that splits off to the left. Anyone can use it, because that’s all state land. About three miles up, it ends at an outlook called Skytop. I never took you kids there, because it’s dangerous—just a granite slope ending in a two-thousand-foot drop. There’s no fence, just a sign warning people to keep back from the edge. At the Skytop summit there’s an iron pole twenty feet high. It’s driven deep into the rock. I have no idea who put it there, or why, but it’s been there a long, long time. It should be rusty, but it’s not. Do you know why it’s not?”
I shook my head.
“Because it’s been struck by lightning so many times. Skytop’s a special place. It draws the lightning, and that iron rod is its focal point.”
He was looking dreamily off toward Goat Mountain. It was certainly not big compared to the Rockies (or even the White Mountains of New Hampshire), but it dominated the rolling hills of western Maine.
“The thunder is louder there, Jamie, and the clouds are closer. The sight of those stormclouds rolling in makes a person feel very small, and when a person is beset by worries . . . or doubts . . . feeling small is not such a bad thing. You know when the lightning’s going to come, because there’s a breathless feeling in the air. A feeling of . . . I don’t know . . . an unburned burning. Your hair stands on end and your chest gets heavy. You can feel your skin trembling. You wait, and when the thunder comes, it doesn’t boom. It cracks, like when a branch loaded with ice finally gives way, only a hundred times louder. There’s silence . . . and then a click in the air, sort of like the sound an old-fashioned light switch makes. The thunder rolls and the lightning comes. You have to squint, or the stroke will blind you and you won’t see that iron pole go from black to purple-white and then to red, like a horseshoe in the forge.”
“Wow,” I said.
He blinked and came back. He kicked the tire of his new-old car. “Sorry, kiddo. Sometimes I get carried away.”
“It sounds awesome.”
“Oh, it’s way beyond awesome. Go up there sometime when you’re older and see for yourself. Just be careful around the pole. The lightning has chipped up all kinds of loose scree, and if you started to slide, you might not be able to stop. And now, Jamie, I really do have to get rolling.”
“I wish you didn’t have to go.” I wanted to cry some more, but I wouldn’t let myself.
“I appreciate that, and I’m touched by it, but you know what they say—if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” He opened his arms. “Now give me another hug.”
I hugged him hard, breathing deep, trying to store up the smells of his soap and his hair tonic—Vitalis, the kind my dad used. And now Andy, as well.
“You were my favorite,” he said into my ear. “That’s another secret you should probably keep.”
I just nodded. There was no need to tell him that Claire already knew.
“I left something for you in the parsonage basement,” he said. “If you want it. Key’s under the doormat.”
He set me on my feet, kissed me on the forehead, then opened the driver’s door. “This caa ain’t much, chummy,” he said, putting on a Yankee accent that made me smile in spite of how bad I felt. “Still, I reckon it’ll get me down the road apiece.”
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you, too,” he said. “But don’t you cry on me again, Jamie. My heart is already as broken as I can stand.”
I didn’t cry again until he was gone. I stood there and watched him back down the driveway. I watched him until he was out of sight. Then I walked home. We still had a hand pump in our backyard in those days, and I washed my face in that freezing-cold water before I went inside. I didn’t want my mother to see that I’d been crying, and ask me why.
• • •
It would be the job of the Ladies Auxiliary to give the parsonage a good stem-to-stern cleaning, removing all traces of the ill-fated Jacobs family and making it ready for the new preacher, but there was no hurry, Dad said; the wheels of the New England Methodist Bishopric moved slowly, and we would be lucky to have a new minister assigned to us by the following summer.
“Let it sit awhile,” was Dad’s advice, and the Auxiliary was happy enough to take it. They didn’t get to work with their brooms and brushes and vacuums until after Christmas (Andy preached the lay sermon that year, and my parents almost burst with pride). Until then, the parsonage stood empty, and some of the kids at my school began to claim that it was haunted.
There was one visitor, though: me. I went on a Saturday afternoon, once more cutting through Dorrance Marstellar’s cornfield to evade the watchful eye of Me-Maw Harrington. I used the key under the doormat and let myself in. It was scary. I had scoffed at the idea that the place might be haunted, but once I was inside, it was all too easy to imagine turning around and seeing Patsy and Tag-Along-Morrie standing there, hand in hand, goggle-eyed and rotting.
Don’t be stupid, I told myself. They’ve either gone on to some other place or just into black nothing, like Reverend Jacobs said. So stop being scared. Stop being a stupid fraidy-cat.
But I couldn’t stop being a stupid fraidy-cat any more than I could stop having a stomachache after eating too many hotdogs on Saturday night. I didn’t run away, though. I wanted to see what he had left me. I needed to see what he had left me. So I went to the door that still had a poster on it (Jesus holding hands with a couple of kids who looked like Dick and Jane in my old first-grade reader), and the sign that said LET THE LITTLE CHILDREN COME UNTO ME.
I turned on the light and went down the stairs and looked at the folding chairs stacked against the wall, and the piano with the cover down, and Toy Corner, where the little table was now bare of dominos and coloring books and Crayolas. But Peaceable Lake was still there, and so was the little wooden box with Electric Jesus inside. That was what he had left me, and I was horribly disappointed. Nonetheless, I opened the box and took Electric Jesus out. I set him at the edge of the lake, where I knew the track was, and started to reach up under his robe to turn him on. Then the greatest rage of my young life swept through me. It was as sudden as one of those lightning strikes Reverend Jacobs had talked about seeing up on Skytop. I swung my arm and knocked Electric Jesus all the way to the far wall.
“You’re not real!” I shouted. “You’re not real! It’s all a bunch of tricks! Damn you, Jesus! Damn you, Jesus! Damn you, damn you, damn you, Jesus!”
I ran up the stairs, crying so hard I could barely see.
• • •
We never did get another minister, as it turned out. Some of the local padres tried to take up the slack, but attendance dropped to almost nothing, and by my senior year of high school, our church was locked and shuttered. It didn’t matter to me. My belief had ended. I have no idea what happened to Peaceable Lake and Electric Jesus. The next time I went into the downstairs MYF room in the parsonage—this was a great many years later—it was completely empty. As empty as heaven.
IV
Two Guitars. Chrome Roses. Skytop Lightning.
When we look back, we think our lives form patterns; every event starts to look logical, as if something—or Someone—has mapped out all our steps (and missteps). Take the foul-mouthed retiree who unknowingly ordained the job I worked at for twenty-five years. Do you call that fate or just happenstance? I don’t know. How can I? I wasn’t even there on the night when Hector the Barber went looking for his old Silvertone guitar. Once upon a time, I would have said we choose our paths at random: this happened, then that, hence the other. Now I know better.
There are forces.
• • •
In 19
63, before the Beatles burst on the scene, a brief but powerful infatuation with folk music gripped America. The TV show that came along at the right time to capitalize on the craze was Hootenanny, featuring such Caucasian interpreters of the black experience as the Chad Mitchell Trio and the New Christy Minstrels. (Perceived commie Caucasians like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez were not invited to perform.) My brother Conrad was best friends with Billy Paquette’s older brother, Ronnie, and they watched The Hoot, as they called it, every Saturday night at the Paquettes’ house.
At that time, Ronnie and Billy’s grandfather lived with the Paquettes. He was known as Hector the Barber because that had been his trade for almost fifty years, although it was hard to visualize him in the role; barbers, like bartenders, are supposed to be pleasantly chatty types, and Hector the Barber rarely said anything. He just sat in the living room, tipping capfuls of bourbon whiskey into his coffee and smoking Tiparillos. The smell of them permeated the whole house. When he did talk, his discourse was peppered with profanity.
He liked Hootenanny, though, and always watched it with Con and Ronnie. One night, after some white boy sang something about how his baby left him and he felt so sad, Hector the Barber snorted and said, “Shit, boys, that ain’t the blues.”
“What do you mean, Grampa?” Ronnie asked.
“Blues is mean music. That boy sounded like he just peed the bed and he’s afraid his mama might find out.”
The boys laughed at this, partly out of delight, partly in amazement that Hector was actually something of a music critic.
“You wait,” he said, and slowly mounted the stairs, yanking himself along by the banister with one gnarled hand. He was gone so long the boys had almost forgotten about him when Hector came back down carrying a beat-up Silvertone guitar by the neck. Its body was scuffed and held together with a hank of frayed hayrope. The tuning keys were crooked. He sat down with a grunt and a fart, and hauled the guitar onto his bony knees.
“Shut that shit off,” he said.
Ronnie did so—that week’s hoot was almost over, anyway. “I didn’t know you played, Grampa,” he said.
“Ain’t in years,” Hector said. “Put it away when the arthritis started to bite. I don’t know if I can even tune the bitch anymore.”
“Language, Dad,” Mrs. Paquette called from the kitchen.
Hector the Barber paid no attention to her; unless he needed her to pass the mashed potatoes, he rarely did. He tuned the guitar slowly, muttering curses under his breath, then played a chord that actually sounded a bit like music. “You could tell it was still off,” Con said when he told me the story later, “but it was pretty cool, anyway.”
“Wow!” Ronnie said. “Which chord is that, Grampa?”
“E. All this shit starts with E. But wait, you ain’t heard nothing yet. Lemme see if I can remember how this whoremaster goes.”
From the kitchen: “Language, Dad.”
He paid no more mind this time, only began to strum the old guitar, using one horny, nicotine-yellowed fingernail as a pick. He was slow at first, muttering more unapproved language under his breath, but then he picked up a steady, chugging rhythm that made the boys glance at each other in amazement. His fingers slid up and down the fretboard, clumsily at first, then—as the old memory synapses guttered back to life—a little more smoothly: B to A to G and back home to E. It’s a progression I’ve played a hundred thousand times, although in 1963 I wouldn’t have known an E chord from a spinal cord.
In a high, wailing voice utterly unlike the one he spoke in (when he did speak), Ronnie’s grandpa sang: “Why don’t you drop down, darlin, let your daddy see . . . you got somethin, darlin, keep on worryin me . . .”
Mrs. Paquette came in from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dishtowel and looking as if she’d seen some exotic bird—an ostrich or an emu, say—strutting down the middle of Route 9. Billy and little Rhonda Paquette, who could have been no more than five, came halfway down the stairs, leaning over the railing and goggling at the old man.
“That beat,” Con told me later. “It sure wasn’t like anything they play on Hootenanny.”
Hector the Barber was now thumping his foot in time and grinning. Con said he’d never seen the old man grin before, and it was a little scary, like he’d turned into some kind of singing vampire.
“My mama don’t allow me to fool around all night long . . . she afraid some woman might . . . might . . .” He drew it out. “Miiight not treat me right!”
“Go, Grampa!” Ronnie shouted, laughing and clapping his hands.
Hector launched into the second verse, the one about how the jack of diamonds told the queen of spades to go on and start her creepin ways, but then a string broke: TWANNG.
“Oh, you dirty cunt,” he said, and that was it for Hector the Barber’s impromptu concert. Mrs. Paquette snatched away his guitar (the broken string flying dangerously close to her eye) and told him to go on outside and sit on the porch if he was going to talk that way.
Hector the Barber did not go out on the porch, but he did lapse back into his accustomed silence. The boys never heard him sing and play again. He died the following summer, and Charles Jacobs—still going strong in 1964, the Year of the Beatles—officiated at his funeral.
• • •
The day after that abbreviated version of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “My Mama Don’t Allow Me,” Ronnie Paquette found the guitar in one of the swill barrels out back, deposited there by his outraged mom. Ronnie took it to school, where Mrs. Calhoun, the English teacher who doubled as the middle school music teacher, showed him how to put on a new string, and how to tune it by humming the first three notes of “Taps.” She also gave Ronnie a copy of Sing Out!, a folk music magazine that had both lyrics and chord changes to songs like “Barb’ry Allen.”
During the next couple of years (with a brief hiatus during the time when the Ski Pole of Destiny rendered Connie mute), the two boys learned folk song after folk song, trading the old guitar back and forth as they learned the same basic chords Leadbelly no doubt strummed during his prison years. Neither of them could play worth a tin shit, but Con had a pretty good voice—although too sweet to be convincing on the blues tunes he loved—and they performed in public a few times, as Con and Ron. (They flipped a coin to see whose name would come first.)
Con eventually got his own guitar, a Gibson acoustic with the cherry finish. It was a hell of a lot nicer than Hector the Barber’s old Silvertone, and it was the one they used when they sang stuff like “Seventh Son” and “Sugarland” at the Eureka Grange on Talent Night. Our dad and mom were encouraging, and so were Ronnie’s folks, but GIGO holds true for guitars as well as computers: garbage in, garbage out.
I paid little attention to Con and Ron’s attempts to attain local stardom as a folk duo, and hardly noticed when my brother’s interest in his Gibson guitar began to wither away. After Reverend Jacobs drove his new-old car out of Harlow, it felt to me as if there was a hole in my life. I had lost both God and my only grownup friend, and for a long time after I felt sad and vaguely frightened. Mom tried to cheer me up; so did Claire. Even my dad had a go. I tried to get happy again, and eventually succeeded, but as 1965 gave way to 1966 and then 1967, the cessation of badly rendered tunes like “Don’t Think Twice” from upstairs wasn’t even on my radar.
By then Con was all about high school athletics (he was a hell of a lot better at those than he ever was at playing the guitar), and as for me . . . a new girl had moved into town, Astrid Soderberg. She had silky blond hair, cornflower-blue eyes, and little sweater-nubbins that might in the future become actual breasts. During the first years we were in school together, I don’t think I ever crossed her mind—unless she wanted to copy my homework, that was. I, on the other hand, thought of her constantly. I had an idea that if she allowed me to touch her hair, I might have a heart attack. One day I got the Webster’s dictionary from the r
eference shelf, took it back to my desk, and carefully printed ASTRID across the definition of kiss, with my heart thumping and my skin prickling. Crush is a good word for that sort of infatuation, because crushed is how I felt.
Picking up Con’s Gibson never occurred to me; if I wanted music I turned on the radio. But talent is a spooky thing, and has a way of announcing itself quietly but firmly when the right time comes. Like certain addictive drugs, it comes as a friend long before you realize it’s a tyrant. I found that out for myself the year I turned thirteen.
First this, then that, hence the other thing.
• • •
My musical talent was far from huge, but much larger than Con’s . . . or anyone else’s in our family, for that matter. I discovered it was there on a boring, overcast Saturday in the fall of 1969. Everyone else in the family—even Claire, who was home from college for the weekend—had gone over to Gates Falls for the football game. Con was then a junior and a starting tailback for the Gates Falls Gators. I stayed home because I had a stomachache, although it wasn’t as bad as I made out; I just wasn’t much of a football fan, and besides, it looked like it was going to rain.
I watched TV for awhile, but there was more football on two channels, and golf on the third—even worse. Claire’s old bedroom was now Connie’s, but some of her paperbacks were still stacked in the closet, and I thought I might try one of the Agatha Christies. Claire said they were easy to read, and it was fun to detect along with Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot. I walked in and saw Con’s Gibson in the corner, surrounded by an untidy heap of old Sing Out! magazines. I looked at it, leaning there and long forgotten, and thought, I wonder if I could play “Cherry, Cherry” on that.
I remember that moment as clearly as my first kiss, because the thought was an exotic stranger, utterly unconnected to anything that had been on my mind when I walked into Con’s room. I’d swear to it on a stack of Bibles. It wasn’t even like a thought. It was like a voice.