by Alex Bledsoe
“I know what you mean,” he said with no irony. “So she’s retarded? Or ‘challenged,’ I think they call it now?”
“‘Challenged’ is better because it’s more accurate. Something was done to her, and she can’t escape it. But she’s resisting it the best she can.”
“Why don’t you help her, then?”
Bliss’s voice choked. “Because I can’t.”
He wanted to ask more, but there was something in her voice, a pain so similar to his own that this time, he reached over and took her hand. At first she allowed it, then squeezed his fingers and pulled her hand free.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It slips up on me, too.”
“Will she hurt me?”
“No. She wouldn’t. If she’s visiting you, she senses something about you.”
“Like what?”
“A … kinship, for lack of a better word.”
“Because of my hair?”
“No. Something deeper. Something painful.”
He started to reply, but the memory of the way she’d snuggled her cheek into his hand overwhelmed him. The girl, like her sister, like Rob, carried around more pain than a being should have to. They were all three bound by it.
Bliss put the truck back in gear and drove on. Light showed through the trees ahead.
“Looks like a good crowd,” she murmured. They rounded the last curve, and Rob saw two dozen other vehicles parked neatly parallel along the road. Past them stood a huge old barn. In the moonlight, the roof sported immense painted letters urging people to SEE ROCK CITY, although Rob couldn’t imagine a lot of tourists passed it. Bliss parked at the end of the line.
Rob had heard many types of singing in his life, but never anything that filled the air like this music. He sat transfixed, as caught in the melodies as a deer in headlights. He distinguished fiddles, guitars, accordions, and each rang with a purity he’d never encountered, as if somehow the song reached directly into his heart and connected with his emotions.
“You all right?” Bliss asked with a knowing smile.
“I hope so,” Rob said. “Unless I’ve died, and this is heaven.”
“What if it’s hell?”
“Like Mark Twain said, heaven for the climate, hell for the company.”
This made her smile. “Come on, I want you to meet someone.”
They grabbed their guitars, and Bliss took the cooler from the picnic basket. Then they walked up the road toward the barn. Rob saw a vast shimmering starfield above the trees, brighter than he’d ever seen before. He blinked as several dark objects quickly flew over just above the treetops, momentarily blocking the stars as they passed. They were too big for birds or bats, but he couldn’t imagine what else they might be. Kites at night?
Bliss stopped and turned to him. “I almost forgot, I have to warn you about something. They’ll offer you drinks. Mostly homemade, but somebody always brings beer. It’s very important that you don’t drink anything except the stuff I brought in this cooler.”
“Why?”
She ignored the question. “I need your word on it. I know you’re honorable, and if you say you won’t do it, you won’t do it.”
“Why?” he asked again.
“I promise I’ll tell you later, and you’ll believe me then. But I need your word now.”
He sighed. “Okay, I promise. I won’t drink anything except what’s in your cooler.”
He followed her up the driveway, and almost immediately the music drowned out the sound of their feet crunching gravel. He didn’t recognize the song, but it carried that eternal, timeless quality only the best tunes embody.
He glanced back the way they’d come. The road disappeared so thoroughly into the darkness that he worried it had vanished. “What if I decide to leave on my own?”
“You’d never find your way out,” Bliss said. “Just like no one who isn’t invited will ever find their way in.”
When they reached the barn door, the dozen or so people gathered there all warmly greeted Bliss. They were big men and small wiry women, dressed exactly as Rob imagined working-class mountain folk would dress. To one side, a prepubescent girl danced on a flat board thrown on the ground while a young man marked time with spoons that echoed the tempo of the music inside. The girl watched her feet with grim concentration, the lace hem of her dress fluttering like a line of white butterflies.
A large man in overalls and an Atlanta Braves cap sat on an old crate at the side door, a cigar box on his lap. Moths and other insects circled the light above him. “Hey, Bliss,” he said as he hugged her.
“Hey, Uncle Node. How are you doing tonight?”
“If things get any better, I might have to hire someone to help me enjoy it.”
“Sounds like quite a crowd.”
“Yes indeedy. Something in the air seems to’ve called everybody out tonight.”
Bliss nodded toward the dancing girl. “Clementine’s getting pretty good at that flatfooting.”
He smiled proudly. “She sure is. I reckon by winter, she’ll be ready to move inside.”
“Reckon so, too. Noah Vanover, this is my friend Rob. He’s a musician, too.”
“Never woulda guessed with that guitar case,” Vanover said with a grin. He offered his hand. “How y’all doing? Call me Uncle Node, everybody else does.”
“Good to meet you, Uncle Node,” Rob said. The man had an immensely strong handshake.
“Quite a shiner you got there,” he said, nodding at Rob’s black eye.
“Tiffany Gwinn,” Bliss said. “Rob stood up to her and lived to tell about it.”
“Now, that I would’ve purely loved to have seen.”
Bliss dug in her pockets and produced what looked to Rob like two small rocks. “This should cover me and him,” she said, and handed them to Vanover. They clattered against other stones when he put them in the cigar box.
“Always a pleasure, never a chore,” he said with a smile. “Y’all have a good time.”
They entered to the right of the bandstand. A pile of guitar, fiddle, dulcimer, and other instrument cases rested against the wall, and Bliss propped hers among them. She leaned close and yelled in Rob’s ear, “It’s okay to leave your guitar here!”
Rob nodded, a bit overwhelmed. The building’s interior seemed bigger inside than it had appeared outside, like a hillbilly TARDIS. Bright overhead lights hung from wires spaced among the wooden crossbeams. Stacked in a stairstep fashion and covered with blankets, hay bales provided rough bleacher-style seating. The band riser was made of old shipping pallets covered with particle board.
At least three hundred people were crammed inside. They lined the walls and covered the hay bale bleachers, while perhaps a third of the crowd filled the hard-packed dirt dance floor in the center. Couples danced in old-style formality, but some individuals also flatfooted on pieces of wood just like the girl outside. And everyone sported the “Tufa look”—dark hair, dark skin, and seemingly perfect teeth.
“How often do you do this?” Rob hollered into Bliss’s ear.
“There’s something going on here most nights,” Bliss called back. “Lots of people still don’t have cable or the Internet. This is what they do instead.”
He followed her around the dance floor. They all seemed to know Bliss; she waved, smiled, hugged, and shook hands with almost everyone they passed. Rob was sure she introduced him to a dozen people, but he couldn’t hear a thing over the music and crowd noise. When they reached the hay bleachers, they sat with the cooler between them. He’d never seen anyone look so at home, so happy, as Bliss did at that moment.
The song finished, and the crowd applauded both the musicians and the dancers. The flatfooters held hands and bowed in a group: hefty men, skinny boys, and hard-looking women in long dresses. They gathered their boards and left the dance floor. Some of the musicians left the stage, and new ones took their place.
The squat little bandleader, who held a guitar that his stubby arms could barely reach,
said, “Thank y’all. Hey, if you see a banjo player on one side of the road and an accordion player on the other, which do you run over first?” He paused for effect. “The accordion player. Business before pleasure.”
The crowd laughed good-naturedly, while both the banjo and accordion players pretended to beat the man with their instruments.
“Play ‘The Seven Nights’ Drunk’!” someone called.
“Naw, not that ol’ nonsense,” the man said, and a chorus of boos responded. He just smiled and shook his head. “See, that’s why I’d rather milk cows for a livin’ and play just for fun. Then I can play what I want to!”
The round little man waved and left the stage to a smattering of applause. The other musicians milled around, waiting as the next performer came forward.
“See that girl?” Bliss said. She indicated a teenager who now stood at center stage, tucking a fiddle under her chin and talking to the old man who played lap dulcimer. “Page Paine. She’s only fourteen. She may not be the best fiddler in Tennessee, but the ones that can beat her don’t run in bunches. A guy from Nashville heard about her, wanted to sign her up and turn her into the next Taylor Swift.”
“Didn’t happen?”
Bliss shook her head. “Nope. That’s not the reason she plays music.”
Page stepped up to the microphone and said, “Hi, y’all.” The crowd applauded again, and a few people whooped. Page smiled shyly. Her long-limbed, gawky body seemed to consist mainly of elbows and knees. “Heck, I ain’t even played nothin’ yet.” There was some laughter at this. “This first number we call ‘Knee Hig ’Em.’ It’s sorta made up.”
“What does ‘Knee Hig ’Em’ mean?” Rob asked Bliss.
“‘I don’t understand.’”
Carefully, he repeated, “What … does…”
“No, that is what it means. It means, ‘I don’t understand.’”
“Oh, sorry. In what language?”
Before she could answer, the drummer, a long-bearded young man in a faded tie-dye shirt, counted four and the band began to play. The other musicians melded together and formed a mass of sound over which Page’s fiddle soared. There was no other word for it: her skill was secondary to something ineffable, something spiritual that came directly from her soul and touched each person in the audience through the medium of her playing. Musicians dream of connecting this way, Rob knew, and to witness it—to experience it—gave him chills.
He recalled a book he’d read about the father of bluegrass, Bill Monroe. He’d talked of “the ancient tones,” undernotes that sustained while the fiddler played the melody, allowing the music to fill more space than seemed possible. For the first time, Rob understood what the old master meant. Page certainly did.
When she finished, she bowed and tossed her hair dramatically. The applause was genuine and enthusiastic.
“Holy shit,” Rob said as he clapped. “Do they realize how good they are?”
“Oh, yes,” Bliss answered simply.
Page pointed her bow at the back of the room. “I do believe I see my cousin Bliss back there,” Page said. “I bet we can get her up here if we try hard enough.”
People turned to look and began shouting good-natured encouragement. Bliss looked at Rob, and he nodded. She hopped down off the hay and crossed the dance floor, once again running a gauntlet of well-wishers and friends. She didn’t get her guitar, but instead climbed onstage and stood next to Page, who was half a head taller.
Page leaned down and whispered something to Bliss, who nodded. Then she said something to the band, and once again, the drummer counted off.
This song was completely different. It had a deep, primal rhythm that was more African than Appalachian, and Page played sharp percussive notes, not the soaring ones that filled every corner of the room. The crowd didn’t dance, and most of the extraneous conversation dropped off, as if in respect.
Bliss stepped to the microphone and sang the first verse:
One time a man came up the mountain
Looking for the promised land
He brought all the evils his life had made
With him in the palm of his hand
Page leaned in to harmonize on the chorus. Unlike a lot of women’s voices, they didn’t aim for the higher registers, but kept their harmonies low, and bit off the end of each line:
The wind tried to blow him back down the hill
The rain tried to wash him away
But he knew at the top he’d find what he sought
But not the price he’d have to pay
Then Page, still playing, sang the next verse:
There he met a girl with the eyes of the sea
And a soul as cold as the moon
She laughed at his pain and then took his heart
And mocked his eternal ruin
Again they harmonized on the chorus, which they sang twice, and the band dropped away until the only sound was a single long, mournful note from Page’s violin. Bliss stepped back to the microphone.
She taunted his love, and tainted his heart
With venom he’d never known
Her bitterness swallowed him and spit him forth
Half-eaten and without a home
Page joined her, but sang only a sad, mountain-style wail while still playing the same long, quavering note. Rob couldn’t imagine how she kept both melodies straight, but the effect was chilling. There wasn’t a sound in the place now other than the music.
Bliss sang:
When the sun arose it found only his bones
It kissed them and shed not a tear
The moon gleamed off them in the cold of the night
Until the mountain swallowed them dear
Then Page, along with the drummer and upright bass player, joined in on the final verse. The addition of these male voices added a last, sepulchral aura to the song.
So my love, don’t climb with pain in your heart
Or bitterness filling your soul
The wind and the rain won’t save you, my dear
From the arms that are waiting and cold
The other musicians built to a crescendo, then dropped off sharply, leaving only the long, wailing violin note quivering in the silence. Page snapped it off like a gunshot, and there was a moment of total, dead silence before the crowd began applauding and whooping its appreciation.
Rob was flabbergasted. The music being played here, by these people, was on a par with the best stuff he’d heard anywhere. It was the kind of music he wanted to play, the cosmic antithesis of the shallow, technique-oriented reality show crap that had inundated him. These were world-class players, and here they were in a barn in the middle of the Smoky Mountains playing for the sheer hell of it.
Below him, a big man packed into a too-small lawn chair looked up at Rob and smiled. “Want a beer?” he said, offering a can.
Remembering his promise, Rob shook his head. “No, thanks. Makes me act stupid.”
“Drink is the curse of the workin’ man,” he said. “Course, work is the curse of the drinking man.”
“And drink is the work of the cursing man?” Rob deadpanned. The big man howled in laughter, until Bliss’s voice again came through the speakers.
“Thanks, y’all. I got kind of a surprise of my own for you, a friend of mine from the flatlands who’s a heckuva picker. Rob, come on down. Rob Quillen, ladies and gentlemen!”
Rob hopped off the hay bleachers and followed Bliss’s trail to the stage. If anyone recognized him, it didn’t interfere with their enthusiasm; he saw no whispered asides or pointing fingers. Amazingly, he also felt no qualms, just an eagerness to join these players.
A teenage boy, shirtless beneath overalls and sporting a scraggly soul patch, stepped in front of him just before he reached his instrument. “I think you’ll be wanting to use this instead.” He held up an electric guitar.
Rob said, “No, I’ve got my own.”
The boy smiled. “You can’t rock the hills with a whisper, son.”
Rob took the instrument to avoid any trouble, but as he put the strap over his head, he felt more complete than he had in months. The instrument felt amazing in his hands, perfectly balanced and as comfortable as if he’d been playing it for years. It was a first-generation Telecaster Esquire, with the finish worn in places by years of playing. He looked for a cord to plug into the jack, then realized there was a wireless unit taped to the strap. The boy who’d given him the ax turned on an amplifier, which buzzed and chirped when Rob touched the strings. He gave Rob a thumbs-up, then disappeared into the crowd.
Rob stepped onstage next to Bliss and Page, grinning. “What are we playing?”
The drummer pointed a stick at him. “One of yours.”
“Mine? You don’t know any of—”
“Tell us the changes, we’ll be fine,” one of the others assured him. It was a woman in her thirties, with tight jeans and short hair. Rob swore she hadn’t been there a moment ago, but now she was, holding an electric bass.
At once he knew exactly what song to play, one that was musically simple enough the band could easily get it and run with it. “Changes are one-three-five, Bo Diddley style.”
A wiry man with leathery skin and an eye patch carried a banjo onstage. “Care if I join in?”
“You ever played Chuck Berry on that thing?” Rob asked.
“Once. Down in Louisiana, close to New Orleans.”
“Hop onboard, then. Everybody else clear?”
They all nodded as if playing a brand-new song off the tops of their heads happened every day.
Rob stepped to the microphone. “I’d like to thank everyone for making me feel so welcome. This is one of my own songs; hope you like it.”
He began to play, and the others listened as he strummed the first stanza in full before he began to sing:
On a hot summer night down in Bourbonville
He left his wife in bed asleep and got behind the wheel
Laid a long track across the county line
To a hoppin’ little roadhouse hid behind the pines
A little girl was playin’ so the place could hop