by Chris Fabry
She hit the post perfectly and the vocals started. I clapped my hands and gave her a standing ovation. Natalie just beamed. Callie came through the door and Mae followed behind her, wiping her eyes and smiling.
“Did you hear it, Mamaw?” Natalie said.
“I sure did, honey. Every second.” She laughed. “You just got better and better, didn’t you?”
“Did you hear what I said about Papaw?”
She hugged the girl. “Oh, I liked that a lot.”
“I was kind of nervous at first, but then Mr. Allman told me to stop reading from the script and just talk, and that helped. It made me feel like I was being myself.”
“The most important rule of radio,” I said. “She’s a real natural.”
“You sure are,” Callie said. She leaned down to Natalie. “I made some cookies while you were doing the show and they’re ready. Just got them out of the oven. You want to come help me put frosting and sprinkles on them?”
Natalie jumped up and ran through the door with Callie following. Mae turned to me and at first couldn’t speak. Then she gathered herself.
“Billy, you can’t know all that little girl has been through. It’s been a tough row to hoe. You’ve probably heard some things, but you can’t know.”
“I expect you’re right about that.”
“This has been the most wonderful gift. I can’t tell you what it means to her. I’ve had to get her to stop talking about it, she goes on so much. But I’ll understand if you don’t think it’ll work out in the long run.”
“Work out?” I said, laughing. “Mae, she’s the best thing to happen to this station since digital music. I want her to come back every week. And then I’ll gradually teach her the board and let her feet get wet. She’s like a little sponge, just soaking things up.”
“Don’t I know it.”
I switched to the computer’s list, and it took over and began the evening programs and music.
Mae headed out the door, then turned back to me. “Her daddy—well, the man who took care of her for years . . .” She got a far-off look in her eyes. “You don’t think you could record Natalie’s next show, could you? I’ll bet he’d like to hear it.”
“You can send him tonight’s if you want.”
“You recorded it?”
“You think I’d miss this little piece of history? I can make a CD and send it to him tomorrow.”
She wrote down his address, and I told her I’d be glad to put it in the mail.
* * *
A lot of things in life start out small, and that was one of them. Nobody paid much attention to a little girl playing music on a low-power radio station in the middle of nowhere. It just wasn’t on the radar screen of what people would call important. But there was something more going on behind the scenes. Something bigger.
The next week I sent some notes to Natalie explaining how she might improve, and the girl progressed so much it was scary. She used three-by-five cards to jot down phrases and thoughts about the songs and talked like she was sitting across the table from a little friend of hers, having cookies and milk.
“She’s going to work me out of a job if she keeps up,” I said to Mae afterward.
The woman beamed. “It’s like watching a flower bloom, isn’t it?”
“I reckon it is.”
“I got a call last night from the man you sent the CD to. He has an idea.”
“Don’t tell me he wants a show too?”
“No, no. I told him about your station and what you’re doing here. He was just flying high being able to hear her voice. He said it was like listening to the sun shining. You can imagine how hard it was to give up a little thing like that after caring for her, but I think he knew it would be best for her to be here with us. With me, now. I gotta tell you that story someday.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Well, a funny thing. He asked if there was any way to hear what you do on the Internet. I told him I didn’t think you could do that but I’d ask. Is that possible?”
“Mae, people can hardly hear it here on the radio, let alone the Internet,” I said. “It’s all I can do to pay the bills. The costs of streaming our signal is just beyond me.”
“But it can be done, right?”
“Anything can be done if you have the funds. There’s an old boy in town who works on Web site stuff in his spare time. I’ve talked to him, just dreaming, but it’s too expensive.”
“Well, this fellow, John, said he wanted to hear June Bug every week and he was willing to pay whatever it cost to get it out where he lives.”
“Is that so?”
“And he said people all over the country could hear it if it was on the Internet. I guess if you have a connection, you can do that, right?”
“Yeah. But back up a minute. He wants to pay for the whole thing?”
“Said if you could come up with the charges and what it would take, he’d write you a check. But until then, he was going to send you some money to keep those CDs coming.”
The news felt like a gentle rain on dry crops. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
The next Monday I got a check from Colorado for $1,000. On top of the check it said John and Sheila Johnson. John told me how much the CDs meant and asked me to get the costs together about the Internet. He gave me his e-mail address and said he would send the money as soon as I had a plan. It was like getting a lightning bolt from heaven. I didn’t do a thing to make it happen; I just did what I had a vision for and the rest fell down. But if it hadn’t been for Natalie, it never would have happened.
Which led to another connection. A few weeks into her program, she came to the station to watch me do the morning show and see how I put it together. While songs played, we talked about the man in Colorado, what it was like leaving him, and what she remembered of her life on the road. Then she turned the conversation around. She could ask the most insightful questions.
She asked why it had taken so long for Callie and me to get married. She asked what had made me interested in radio and talking to people since it seemed like I was the kind of person who liked to live on the end of a road and have my privacy.
“What is it about bluegrass that you like so much, because you have to love something an awful lot to play it as much as you do,” she said.
“I think it’s because it’s in my blood. Has been since I was a little kid. One of my best memories is of my daddy having friends over and playing music together at the house next to Buffalo Creek.”
“Your daddy was a musician?”
“My daddy was a coal miner, but he loved the mandolin and he loved good music. I credit him with this love I have.”
“Did you ever play?”
“Mm-hmm. Daddy gave me his mandolin, and I learned to play it pretty well. Even got to play in a music group once.”
“You did? Did you ever make a record?”
“The group had records, but I never got to play on one.”
“Where’s your mandolin now?”
“Sold it.”
“Why?”
“I needed the money for equipment.”
“That’s sad. I’d like to hear you play.”
“Maybe someday you will.”
29
The summer got hot and the days long. The fourth birthday of the station was coming up, and Callie suggested we launch the Web site and Internet stream to coincide with it. I’d gotten the check from Colorado that covered all the costs and then some.
I could tell Callie had something up her sleeve as we got close to the day. She took off work that day and sat in with me as we had a “flip the switch” ceremony. She wouldn’t go on and talk with me hardly at all because she’s not that kind of person. But she did lean into the microphone once and encourage everybody to listen to June Bug’s show that evening. And that was all she said.
We scheduled dinner at the diner that afternoon, and Natalie and Mae were there, and Callie invited Charles Broughton, the fellow from Char
leston who had been such a help. Several people from the community came by and had a slice of cake to celebrate. Our Web guy, Homer Saunders, came by with a printout and a big smile on his face.
“We’ve already had more than a hundred hits to the site,” he said, showing me the states we’d reached.
“I wonder how many there will be tonight?” Natalie said.
“Thousands,” I said. “Yours will be the most popular show every week.”
She smiled sheepishly like she knew something I didn’t. When it was time to head home, I realized something more was up. Callie lingered at the restaurant, and I said we needed to get back.
“Billy, I need to prepare you for something,” she said. “The show tonight is going to be a little different.”
“How so?”
“It’s a surprise. I need you to go along with it.”
“How can I go along with something I don’t know about?” I put the rest of the cake in the back of the truck and put a brick on the empty spot of the box so it wouldn’t slide.
“You have to trust me. Can you do that?”
“You know I trust you. What about Natalie?”
“She’s the one who had the idea.”
“I figured. What idea is that?”
“I said you had to trust me. Now give me the keys; I need to drive you home.”
It took me a minute because I always drove. The gears on the old truck were sometimes hard to shift, and Callie didn’t like to drive it. I wanted to ask a bunch more questions, but I gave her the keys and sat in the passenger seat. Just before we got to the turnoff to our road, Callie pulled over.
“One more thing. You need to put this on.” She took out the little blindfold she used when she went to sleep each night.
“What do I need that for?”
She just gave me the stare of a woman who will not repeat herself. I took it and covered my eyes. “All right, I trust you.” I waved a hand in front of me. “Driver, proceed.”
We didn’t pull into the driveway but parked along the road. That was strange. She got out and helped me through the ditch and the little field beside the house that I told her would be her garden, but I hadn’t had the time to plow it.
“What time is it?” I said.
“Almost time,” she said. “Watch your step.”
She led me into the building, and instead of turning left into the control room, we turned right into the studio. It was warm in there, and somebody snickered and somebody else said, “Shhh.” Callie sat me down and handed me headphones, and I could hear the music fade.
“We need somebody to engineer—who’s going to do that?” I said.
She pulled the headphones from my ears and said, “You didn’t marry a dummy, Billy.”
That made the people in the room laugh, and there were a lot more than just Natalie. Men’s voices, too. I was trying to piece it together when the music stopped and Natalie spoke without the theme song. I thought it was a mistake at first.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a very special June Bug Hour. This is our first broadcast streaming on the Internet, and tonight’s program is dedicated to our founder and leader, Mr. Billy Allman. And here at the beginning of the program, we decided we would present him with a special gift and then ask him to use it.”
My face felt hot. I didn’t like all the attention and I hate surprises.
“Hold your hands out, Mr. Allman,” Natalie said. “He has a blindfold on, so he has no idea what’s about to happen.”
“That’s normal for Billy,” a man said next to me, and I recognized the voice of Lester Cremeans, one of the pickers for the Gospel Bluegrass Boys.
I held out my hands, and into them came a round piece of wood, smooth and polished, with a long neck. I held it there for a moment, turning it and feeling the craftsmanship. Somebody to my left pecked on my hand and gave me a pick.
“You’ll need this, Billy.”
The room sounded bigger because there was more than Natalie’s microphone on.
“You can take the blindfold off, Mr. Allman,” Natalie said.
I pushed up on it and couldn’t believe what I saw. It was my daddy’s old mandolin—or I thought so at first, but this one wasn’t old; it looked new.
Natalie stood there in front of me, smiling, giving the play-by-play of the look on my face, the others in the room laughing. “We tried to find the one you sold, but we couldn’t,” she said. “But my daddy found this one on eBay. He thought you could use it.”
I shook my head and looked around the room at the faces staring at me. I held out a hand to Lester and he shook it.
“It’s been a long time, Billy.” We called him Lester Round because he was kind of portly and we played off the name Lester Flatt. You would have thought that seeing him would have brought the memories I had of Vernon Turley and set me back, but I was happy to be next to him. He was always kind to me.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have assembled some of the best bluegrass pickers in the area to join us tonight in a live and unrehearsed performance,” Natalie said, reading from her script. She introduced Lester and the others—a couple of them I knew and a couple I didn’t. There’s something about musicians from the hills. They don’t need introductions. They say music is the universal language and just playing together is like having a long conversation.
I could scarcely take it in. And then I wondered who was engineering, and I looked over to see Callie and Mae standing behind Jimmy Stillwater, the man who had taken my job at the radio station so long ago. He nodded and gave me a thumbs-up. That’s when I recognized the microphones around the room. He had brought in his own little mixing board and extra microphones to give us a better sound.
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’d like to hear something from the man of the hour,” Natalie said.
Everybody clapped and laughed.
“For once in my life I’m speechless,” I said. They laughed again. “This is about the nicest thing anybody has ever done for me. And I hate to disappoint you, but I haven’t played one of these in a long time.”
“It’ll come back to you, Billy,” Lester said. “It’s like riding a bike. I got it all tuned. What do you say we start it off.”
“You lead; I’ll follow,” I said.
Lester counted us off, and that’s when I realized I didn’t even know what we were playing. But when I heard the first notes, I knew where they were going.
“Here they are, folks, live from Dogwood, West Virginia, for the first time ever, Billy and Good News Bluegrass.”
There’s something about the feel of the mandolin and picking out the tune at hand that makes a person feel right with the world. As soon as the banjo walked up the steps to “I’ll Fly Away,” it all came back. I just kind of strummed the chords and let the others run with the first verse; then Lester nodded to me and I took off on a run at the second one. I kept going, really feeling it, the sound going all the way to my soul. A couple of minutes later we were done with the instrumental, and everybody clapped and Natalie about jumped out of her skin watching me.
“I had no idea you could do that, Mr. Allman,” she said.
“Well, to tell you the truth, I didn’t either,” I said. “It’s been a long time.”
“How do you like the mandolin?” she said.
“It’s the second-best present I’ve ever been given, the first being the Lord’s forgiveness to me.”
“What about your wife?” one of the boys said.
“Third-best present,” I said.
Everybody laughed, and I glanced at Callie in the control room. She had her hands over her face, shaking and crying and just enjoying the moment. The love of a good woman is a wonderful thing, especially one who has held it close for so long and waited. I almost missed it, and right then I kind of choked up.
“What should we do next, Billy?” Lester said. “We have a list of songs here, but this is your day. You call it.”
“You fellows know ‘Power in the Blood
’?” I said.
“‘Would you be free from your burden of sin?’” Lester said. “It’s right here on the list. And Terry over there can sing in between the picking.”
“Let’s do it,” I said.
And we did. It was almost heaven. When I closed my eyes and let the mandolin sing, I was back on the creek, back sitting at my daddy’s feet, in the front room of the old house that wasn’t there anymore. With people who weren’t alive, clapping and stomping and playing.
Music has a way of filling in the missing places. It is a gift from God above, who didn’t have to provide it, but he did anyway and I half think he decided life just wouldn’t be as good without it. Even if you’re penniless and on the street and have nothing at all, or if you’re shut-in and on a sickbed, or if you’re in prison, if you have music, there is something to feed your soul. I guess that’s the reason I started the station in the first place. I could stop playing my own music, but there was a need deep down for something real I didn’t even understand. So in a way, I started the station to feed myself, for selfish reasons, and it blessed others along the way.
We played for more than an hour before I ever thought about getting tired. I slipped in a legal ID, which you’re supposed to do every hour, and we played for another half hour and then did “I’ll Fly Away” to end it all. Terry sang and the whole thing lasted more than six minutes. We were all feeling it, and I knew there was magic in the room, the magic of music, and that we’d never have a night like this again because we were making everything up as we went along and it was all coming from the heart. That’s the best kind of radio there is, and when the moment is gone, you wish you could get it back, but it’s a force of nature you can’t manufacture.
After we switched back to the computer, we couldn’t help ourselves and we played another half hour, recording an instrumental version of “I’ll Fly Away” for Natalie’s show. Finally Lester said he had to get home. The other boys all had day jobs too, and none of them played in bands anymore. They just played because it was part of them. So I had them all write down their numbers on a sheet of paper, and before they left, Natalie said, “Why don’t we do this again next week?”