The Song

by Chris Fabry

  “Like where?”

  “We’ll have that conversation. What I mean is, I’m not expecting you to make a career out of this. Unless you want to. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’d be good, you know.”

  “Sir?”

  “You’d be good at singing. I’ve heard you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  That was all it took and Jed was off and running. Funny how a few words over a bowl of cereal could change a boy’s life. Funny how a well-tuned guitar could too.

  CHAPTER 2

  THERE ARE THINGS in a man’s life that can only be learned from a father. These things encompass chord progressions and song structure and how to mow a straight line on a lawn and change a flat. Not that a mother can’t teach these—she can—but coming from a father, there is more imparted than how to do the task.

  As soon as his father understood how serious Jed was about not just learning the guitar but connecting words to life, he had been involved, listening to Jed’s songs, really hearing what was inside. Jed remembered a day at the dock, sitting by the water with his father and picking out a tune on the banjo, his dad keeping perfect time with the strum of his guitar, tapping his foot and sending ripples over the water. Even the fish seemed to enjoy the music of father and teenage son—a largemouth bass surfaced nearby and splashed, nipping at a fly that danced on the surface.

  His father coughed into the back of his hand and came away with blood. He wiped it on his shirt, thinking Jed hadn’t seen it, but there are some things you can’t hide. Some things that can’t be wiped away.

  The diagnosis came quickly, though it took some coaxing by Jed and a Herculean effort by his mother to get his dad to visit a doctor’s office. And then came the slow, long descent that took everyone by surprise.

  “I always thought I would die in some plane crash,” his father said one night, hooked up to tubes and monitors in his hospital bed. “You die like that and people will never forget you.”

  “I’ll never forget you,” Jed said.

  His father smiled weakly. “There’s a lot about my life I hope you do forget.”

  After another coughing fit, one Jed was glad his mother hadn’t heard, his father wiped his mouth and leaned closer. He still wore the bandanna, though his hair had been cut and his face shaved.

  “I was proud you gave up the cigarettes,” Jed said.

  “I wish I’d never picked them up. But what you think as a kid won’t hurt you will come back to bite you. A lot of things will bite you unless you stay away.”

  Jed waited for more words but there was only coughing and silence from his dad. When a song came on the country channel, his father reached up and held the remote out with a trembling hand to turn off the power. It was as if he had bench-pressed a thousand pounds.

  His hand fell to the covers and he took another shallow breath. “Jed, I made mistakes, but I’ve made my peace with God. I’m going home.”

  “Don’t give up, Dad.”

  “I’m not giving up; I’m just ready. If God wants to do some kind of miracle, he can. He doesn’t need my permission. But if he wants me to come home, I’m good with that. More than good.”

  Jed stared at the silent television.

  “You can think about it like a long concert tour. I’ll just be at a permanent engagement.”

  “Like Las Vegas.”

  His dad laughed and then coughed harder, and Jed wished he hadn’t tried to be funny. When his dad regained his breath, what little was left, he grabbed Jed’s hand. His own hands were calloused from the hard work he liked to do, the carpentry and manual labor. He was a man of music, but also a man who knew the meaning of sweat equity.

  “Heaven’s gonna be a lot better than Vegas, Son.”

  Jed just nodded, feeling his chin quaver. He could write a song to that, the comparison of heaven and Vegas.

  “I want to see you there someday,” his father said. “Will you promise to see me there?”

  Jed nodded again but he couldn’t speak.

  “Follow God, Jed. Do what he says. And it will go well with you. You’ll be the man I could never be.”

  Jed’s father had asked them to put Psalm 23, the whole thing, on his tombstone. “So people can read something that will last,” he had said. Jed’s mother bent down and ran a hand across the crown emblem beside the dates: December 17, 1942–August 10, 2003.

  “He would have been real proud of what you said today,” she told Jed, her voice cracking. “He would have been real proud of you.”

  “I wish I could have put all of that in a song for him, before he was gone. So he could have heard it. So he could have helped me . . .” His voice trailed off and she rose, unsteadily, then clung to him and wept. He held her there by that peaceful place until she pulled back and looked at him.

  “He wanted to tell you so many things. He just didn’t have the words.”

  “He used them all up in his music, didn’t he?”

  She smiled through the tears. “Some men never get them out.”

  “What happened, Mom? Between you two? I’d like to hear your version. I know this isn’t the right time, the right place . . .”

  “It’s the perfect place. Truth works in a graveyard. He would have wanted me to tell you anywhere you asked.”

  And then came the hard story he’d known was there, his mother choking through half of it. Tears falling like rain.

  “You’ve seen the old videos. You know I used to sing with David. My husband, Bill, played mandolin in the band. I’ve never heard anybody before or since who could play that instrument like he could.”

  “He died, right? I read some old news reports online. It was a suicide?”

  “The family kept it quiet but it came out finally. We were all devastated. I found him.”

  “Let’s not talk about this now, Mom.”

  “No, hear me out. Saying all this is hard for me, but to think of you not knowing, or finding out from somebody else, would kill me.”

  “I’ve heard the scuttlebutt at the family reunions. Whispers and shaking heads.”

  “Your father hated those reunions. The story is this. Your father and I had an affair. We broke our vows. It was foolish. I wound up pregnant. I couldn’t deal with knowing the baby wasn’t Bill’s, and David took me to a clinic. It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life. His too.”

  Jed stared at the tombstone and tried to take in the words.

  “Bill found out. I think he knew something was going on but didn’t want to believe it. And he was so hurt, so angry at what we’d done, that he took his own life. I found him hanging at our house, with a note that said he hoped I was happy with the choice I’d made. First person I called was David.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom.” He waited a moment, letting her wipe her eyes, before asking, “And that’s why Dad’s family broke up?”

  She nodded. “His wife gathered the kids and left. I’ve never seen a more broken man. I thought he would drink himself to death, but somehow he got through it.”

  “You got him through it.”

  “We helped each other. He tried to work things out with her, but she divorced him and took almost everything he’d earned. I don’t blame her. I blame myself for most of it. You think the choices you make just affect you and the other person, but you don’t realize how one choice ripples toward everybody. You included.”

  “Me?”

  “When we were married, it was joyful but sad. Your birth signaled a new page in the story. When you were born, it was the best day of my life and your father’s. But there was also this bittersweet knowledge of all that we had done. We tried to move forward in spite of the past, our mistakes. But guilt will follow you. Just hang over you like a dark cloud.”

  “You were a big part of the reason he sang,” Jed said. “The reason he kept going.”

  “The reason he kept going was that God got hold of his heart. And he did the same for me. I’m so ashamed of what happened ba
ck there. How we let our passions run. We hurt a lot of people. And we’ve lived with that. But your father wanted to give you what he couldn’t give his first family.”

  She pulled a weathered journal from her purse and placed it in Jed’s hands. “It’s all here. He always said that a man has to live with his mistakes. But he hoped he could keep you from making the same ones.”

  Later that night Jed opened the book and read the scrawled writing, like a gentle touch from his father. Words that breathed life. Words that made sense of the backstory he had discovered.

  Meaningless. Meaningless.

  Everything is meaningless.

  I have seen everything done under the sun.

  All of it is meaningless.

  Correction and instruction are the way to life,

  keeping you away from your neighbor’s wife.

  Do not go near her door.

  Keep to a path far from her.

  Do not lust in your heart after her beauty or be captivated by her eyes.

  Can a man scoop fire into his lap without his clothes being burned?

  Can a man stand on hot coals without his feet being scorched?

  Another man’s wife preys on your very life.

  No one who touches her will go unpunished.

  I looked and saw all the evil that was taking place under the sun.

  I declared that the dead are happier than the living.

  But better than both is the one who has never been born,

  who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.

  Jealousy arouses a husband’s fury.

  He will not accept any compensation, however great it is.

  A man who commits adultery has no sense. He destroys himself.

  His shame will never be wiped away.

  But the one who confesses and renounces sin finds mercy.

  As you do not know the path of the wind or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb,

  you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.

  Who knows what is good for a person—

  during the few meaningless days they pass through like a shadow?

  Who can tell them what will happen under the sun after they are gone?

  No one knows when their hour will come.

  Generations come. Generations go.

  But the earth remains forever.

  Jed stared at his father’s handwriting and thought of his own life.

  The door opened and his mother slipped into the room.

  “He wanted you to have this, too,” she said, holding out his father’s guitar with the crown on the front, the signature emblem of his career.

  “You’ll want to keep that,” Jed said.

  She shook her head. “No. It belongs to you. He wanted you to make some more great music with it. Nothing would please me more than to have you do that.”

  “I’ll never be half the singer he was. Half the writer. Half the man.”

  “You can be more. Learn from his mistakes. Let his life teach you and give you all you need to be a good man.”

  Jed took the guitar and something close to electricity shot through him. This was the instrument his father had used onstage and behind the scenes to craft tunes people heard on the radio. How many playlists had this guitar’s sound on it?

  As he held the instrument in his hand, he knew he was holding more than the legacy of a singer-songwriter. He knew there was more here than the sum of the parts of an old guitar. He was holding the catalyst, the next step, the heartbeat of a father who couldn’t speak the things he wanted into the life of his son.

  His mother left and he listened to her footfalls down the hardwood hallway. He placed his fingers to play a G chord, then tuned the A string down to G and played the last five strings with the pinkie on the third fret, just like his father had taught him.

  All the ache in my heart and the wound in my soul

  All the tearing apart at saying good-bye

  All the pain deep inside, like a dam giving way . . .

  It was just a passing thought, a phrase he wrote in his journal. He sat there all night with his father’s guitar, strumming, writing, crying, and laughing. The well of his heart was filling even through the brokenness, and Jed knew what he wanted to do with his life.

  CHAPTER 3

  AS LONG AS ROSE JORDAN could remember, she had lived the good life that came from a farm, working the vineyard. The smell of grapes in their season, ripening and hanging in clumps, straining the vines with their weight, filled with juice that represented life itself—all of this invigorated her. This was the perfume of her early years, the thing that greeted her every morning when she awakened.

  The Jordan family traced their roots back to early settlers who had traveled west and been enamored with the good ground they found in Kentucky. The land had been passed from one generation to the next until the town of Sharon was settled in the 1820s. Family squabbles split the land into two different parcels and mirrored the ripping apart at the seams of the country.

  The new century brought with it incorporation, but the vineyard stayed the same, and Rose liked to think that when she looked out on the rows of grapes, she was seeing the same thing that her grandmother had seen and her mother before her, all the way back to the 1700s, when her people first set foot here.

  Growing up on a working vineyard was something that chased her brothers away but held Rose in a grip so tight she knew it would never let go. The boys had only seen the constant work it took to bring forth the wine, but she had seen it as life-giving. Like her mother, she drew comfort from the work instead of fatigue, and her sleep was that much sweeter after a full day of labor.

  A crusty man of the earth who said no more than he needed, her father, Shepherd Jordan, was a pillar in the community, one of the cornerstones of Sharon, but he led a quiet life. Anyone who needed anything could come to him with their broken tractor or ailing horse or financial problem. Several families who had lived on the edges of his land had found a kind benefactor in Shep as their property grew from a third of an acre or less to three or four acres. What was life about if you couldn’t give it away?

  Still, the vineyard was not without controversy. There were some in town who said the Jordan family’s hands were stained with the blood of grapes and broken lives.

  “‘Wine is a mocker and beer a brawler,’” Eunice Edwards had said to Shep’s face one day on their front porch. She was shaking a finger at him and had the other hand on her ample hip. Rose had been captivated by the floral print dress that clung to the woman like a grape skin. She watched from the safety of the living room couch, the voices wafting through the screened window.

  “‘Whoever is led astray by them is not wise,’” Eunice continued. “That’s what the Good Book says. Proverbs 20, verse one.”

  Rose glanced at the car and spotted Eddie, the youngest of the Edwards boys, sitting in the backseat, drumming his fingers on the open window. He was about her age and always had a look on his face like he knew more than he did.

  “Eunice, I don’t disagree with you,” her father said. “There’s an awful lot in the Scriptures about not being drunk with wine. But wine is God’s gift to us. It represents life.”

  “Shepherd, you’ve seen lives destroyed because of alcohol. I don’t know why you would spend your life on something that tears people apart.”

  “Anything good can be used for evil. A car can take you and your son out there to church, or you can use it to take you to some bar. The car isn’t the problem, it’s the heart of—”

  “A body needs to get from one place to another. We don’t need a drink of wine in order to live.”

  “You’re right about that. We don’t need wine. But God gave it to us. It’s a gift that should be used wisely.”

  Eunice shot him a look through her thick-rimmed glasses. She punched the bridge of her nose to push them higher. “I’m going to pray for you, Shep. I’m going to pray God will forgive you and convict you of the si
n you’re committing, and the sins of the fathers down to your generation.”

  She glanced through the window screen and saw Rose. “You’ve got a little girl in there without a mother. What would you think if she took to the wine bottle? What’ll you do when your boys turn out to be drunks?”

  He didn’t answer her, though Rose wanted to. She wanted to shout some of the verses that talked about wine in a positive way. It was good for the stomach, Paul had said. And the Bible said not to get drunk—if it meant you couldn’t drink it, why didn’t it just say, “Don’t drink wine”? But Mrs. Edwards would say that the wine Paul drank and what was around today were different.

  Rose had walked out onto the porch and stood by her father as the car lifted dust from the driveway. “Why does she have to be so mean?”

  Her father gathered her in and she watched the car disappear behind the rows of grapevines. “I suspect it has something to do with her daddy. And her husband. You have to give people who have been smacked around by life a little extra rope, Rose.”

  “Is that why she’s mean?”

  “She’s not mean. She’s just hurt. An animal that’s gentle and friendly growls when it’s injured. Remember that when people act ugly toward you. They’re usually in some kind of pain.”

  Now, a decade later, Rose remembered that scene as she tried to lift the old dollhouse from its storage area in the barn. It was too heavy and bulky and she needed help, but she didn’t want to ask her father. It would pain him to see her get rid of it. After all the work he and her brothers had put into it all those years ago, the cutting and gluing and painting, and the way they unveiled it on her birthday—just days after the run-in with Eunice Edwards—it seemed a shame to part with it.

  They had given it to her when she turned nine, less than a year after her mother had died, and she had played with that dollhouse every day that year. There were three stories to it. The kitchen and dining and living rooms on the first floor, along with a nice laundry and craft area (an homage to her mother), then the bedrooms on the second floor, and on the third was a little room that looked kind of like a cupola, where the husband and wife could look out at the land and enjoy sunsets. The level of detail had fascinated her and made her grateful for a dad and brothers who cared enough to try to do something special, something memorable, even if their hearts were breaking.