by Steve Vernon
That left Waylon only two choices. He could turn back and risk running into the town police or move further into the tunnel and confront whoever was singing.
KLING!
Well, whatever was making that ringing noise, it sure didn’t sound much like a manhunt to Waylon.
“Oh my hammer.”
It sounded like somebody was working down there – which didn’t much sense.
If this was a story Waylon would have followed the sound, but this wasn’t a story - this was a dirty old tunnel through crumbling Virginia shale. Waylon had no way to go but straight ahead – towards the ringing and the singing. So he wasn’t exactly following the sound so much as he was trying to walk straight past it.
KLING!
He tried to count his paces but lost his count somewhere in the darkness. Instead, he found himself counting the ringing sounds. He had been walking for about one hundred and twenty-eight rings when he saw the figure in the darkness.
“Hammer, ring.”
KLING!
One hundred twenty-nine.
Big wasn’t big enough a word for this man. The figure standing in front of Waylon was a mountain of a man, swinging a sledge hammer that looked heavy enough to give Godzilla a goose egg without half-trying.
“Oh my hammer.”
The man’s voice was low and soulful, as if he were singing from about six feet below the soles of his man-and-a-half-sized work boots.
“Hammer, ring.”
KLING!
When that hammer hit home a shower of sparks were raised and a glow seemed to pervade the tunnel darkness. The hammer-glow built like cinder raising the ashes of a long dead blacksmith’s fire.
Waylon could see the big man clearly now. The man’s arms looked like they were made out of anaconda and anchor chains. The muscles in his back moved and rolled like mountains of smooth jet. His back was as wide as the sledge handle was long. His shoulder blades looked like he was wearing bowling balls for shoulder pads.
And then the big man turned around and smiled.
“Oh there you are,” he said, in a voice that rolled out like black strap molasses. “I was wondering what was keeping you.”
Waylon knew he ought to keep on running but there was something downright compelling about finding this man hammering deep down in the darkness.
“What are you digging for?” Waylon asked.
“I’m digging for my life and anything that comes after,” the big man said. “This is what I do.”
“You dig in an abandoned tunnel?”
“I dig because this is how I was born. With a hammer in my hand and a song in my throat.”
Great, Waylon thought. I’m running from the law and I run into a tone-deaf coal miner.
“Say, look here,” the big man said.
He spread the palm of his big right hand out before Waylon.
“I’m not a palm reader,” Waylon protested. “Whatever you’re trying to sell me, there’s no deal.”
But Waylon couldn’t look away.
“I don’t need a palm reader,” the big man said, dropping each word like a wish on the back of a penny dropped into the mouth of a bottomless wishing well. “A witch woman in the Black River area looked in my hand and she told it to me straight and true.”
Waylon kept staring at the big man’s hand. He swore he could see a railroad track and a tunnel and a forever long snake twisting across the plain of the palm.
“That old witch woman, she told me that I would hammer my heart out in the belly of the Big Bend Tunnel. She told me that I would hammer me down a steam engine and that when that steam engine had quit and died that I would hammer six more feet down and then I would lay there in the dirt and let the years and darkness and song cover over me.”
Waylon saw ridges and valleys and mountains and shadow breaking and looming across that big man’s hands.
“She told me that men and women would sing of my work and that even after I was dead and gone that I would work in the darkness of this mountain until another man came along carrying a hammer marked with murdered blood.”
Waylon felt the weight of that ball peen hammer still hanging like a piece of gallow-bait, dangling in his left hand.
“You put the murdering hammer down here in the dirt and pick up my hammer,” the big man said. “You got a lifetime of sinning to hammer out.”
Waylon looked at the big man’s hammer. To his eyes it looked like a boxcar mounted on a telephone pole.
“There’s no way I can use that hammer,” Waylon protested.
And yet the ball peen that he had buried in Roscoe Huntington’s forehead slid from the grip of his left like a greased serpent sliding through a dead man’s hand.
“You bear the mark the same as me,” the big man said. “Right there on your palms.”
Waylon looked at his hands. All he could see were the wide staring eyes of Roscoe Huntington staring back at him.
And behind those eyes the eyes of his Daddy.
“Pick that hammer up,” the big man ordered.
Waylon bent and took up the big man’s hammer.
“Swing it,” the big man said. “Swing it like you were born to.”
Waylon leaned and twisted back and that big man’s hammer seemed to leap up and swing down.
KLING!
“And sing,” the big man said. “Sing like you mean to.”
“Oh my hammer,” Waylon sung as the hammer swung.
KLING!
“Hammer, ring.”
He found he took to the rhythm of the hammer as if he were born to it. The weight seemed not to bother him. The big hammer swung and swooped over his shoulders like it was made out of crow-feather and midnight shadow.
“You are not the first,” the big man said as Waylon worked away. “Neither was I. But you be the second last born. There’ll be another come down this tunnel, by and by. You wait for him and see.”
Waylon kept singing.
The hammer kept on swinging.
“The next one come down here will be the one you’re waiting for,” the big man said. “He’ll take up your hammer and you’ll go home.”
“I can’t go home,” Waylon said, as he swung the hammer up. “They’ll catch me if I do.”
“We all go home, sooner or later,” the big man said. “Just look for the next man.”
KLING!
“How will I know him?” Waylon asked.
“Same as I knew you,” the big man said. “By the marks on his palms.”
And then the big man turned and walked into the darkness of the tunnel, seeming to rise up like a fistful of smoke through the brickwork and the shale and the shadows beyond.
KLING!
And as the big man rose away into the darkness Waylon could hear him sing a song – soft, sad and slow.
“John Henry said to his Daddy, I believe it’s my time to go, just lay my hammer in the shadow of the hole and up to the mountain I will go, lordy, lordy, up to the mountain I will go.”
Waylon kept on hammering for as long as it took.
And then some.
The next story is a Christmas ghost story that I wrote for submission to the Woodland Press collection Appalachian Winter Hauntings (2009) that was edited by Michael Knost and Mark Justice. The story just sort of wrote itself and contains a great deal of that whole fatherhood fetish I told you about earlier. As I said, I was raised by my grandparents. A lot of my stories seem to circle on back to that whole notion of hunting for your father. I spent very little time with my Dad as a child – barely a month in total. He died early, of a heart attack at 53. I don’t know just what I hope to accomplish with all of this writing that I do about hunting for your father – but sometimes the things that we do that make the least amount of sense are more important than life itself.
A Sky Full of Stars and a Big Green Forever
I wish I was anywhere but Christmas.
Winter hung over the Alleghenies like a promise waiting to be kept. Stars winked do
wn, a hoot owl tolled the hour in low barreled tones and I was sitting here and thinking about my Dad.
It had been a year since Dad had let go, just last Christmas.
Dad had tried to walk past the Yule season but the paper thin walls of a heart that had been broken by my mother’s death a year before that had torn open and just let go.
Are you doing the math?
That’s two Christmases and two deaths of people more nearer than hope to me.
So don’t talk to me about celebration.
Things fall away in this life. Everything you try to hang on to is made of wind and smoke and a slippery grip. I’ve left so very much behind me on this road from womb to tomb – a marriage, kids who never call and the lingering bitter aftertaste of a world gone grey and full of unfulfilled dreams.
I’m not complaining, you understand.
We get our share and keep some and give some back and some just walks away but a body is bound to wonder, sometimes. It’s as natural as what we borrow with every hard-took breath.
It will be Christmas tomorrow and I have sent a few cards and filled an old grey work sock with a bone and a chew toy for my bulldog Moose who even now is wagging the memory of his tail at me and happily slobbering on the rug.
That’s something, I guess.
If you don’t count Moose than I am completely alone, a condition I’m slowly growing used to. I’m sitting here by the hearth, listening to the flames talking smack with the pine kindling and chunks of oak I’ve fed it with.
Firewood always reminds me of a riddle Dad used to tell.
“If pine burns so fast and oak so long and strong, how has the evergreen ever learned to last as long as it has?”
There wasn’t any answer, of course. It was just a way that my Dad had of making every minute last a little longer than it was built for. He had a way of slowing time down and making it sit there and grin.
He made me grin, too.
Lord, how I miss the man.
I can see him now, sorting through the woodpile, the whorls and callous of his fingertips worn smooth, looking hard at every chunk he’d pick up. He had a way of hefting each stick of wood as if he was weighing its worth. He never lingered, it was a smooth and natural process, but each piece of timber had to pass that test.
I’m not saying he was a fussy man, but he could be awfully particular when he wanted to be.
It paid off when he courted my mother.
“I caught her eye in high school,” he’d told me. “But she went and married the quarterback on our football team. He showed her his bad side, shortly after the honeymoon. She stayed with him for six years, through black and blue, until he died choking on a fist full of salted nuts, over a warm beer and a bad joke.”
I can still see Dad smiling over that last remark, not out of spite but just savoring the irony. He told the story the same way every time he was asked to, which was how I knew that it was a little more than just a story.
After he’d given her a chance to mourn what she’d lost, my Dad courted my mother with the intensity of a flame that’s been kindling for a lot of long years. Every day he’d bring her bunches of wild roses and sweet-smelling daisies and fistfuls of blue forget-me-not flowers.
You see, my Dad never did have much in the way of folding money, so he learned to make do with another kind of green.
The kind of green that lasted.
In the years that I shared with them I have never seen the man utter a cross word or raise a hand of anger towards my mother. He cherished her with every breath he took. He worked at the wood mill, pushing boards through a sharp whirling saw blade, singing a quiet hosanna of thankfulness to every speck of sawdust and sweat that flew by his ears.
He never missed her birthday. He never forgot to leave the coffee pot brewing before he left for work. I can see him even now, through the dusty looking glass of memory, that old fedora perched on his head, a bright green feather stabbed through the hat band. That long loping way he’d walk that always made me feel like he would never stop moving.
Christmas was his favorite time of year. I can remember when he’d put the window lights on and Momma would always say that he had hung the stars in the night sky – like that string of five and dime lights glinting through the icicles and frosted pane was anything more than a simple pleasure.
Yes sir, my Dad did Christmas up right. Every winter he’d pull on a pair of snowshoes and he’d haul that old sled of his out to the back field where he’d search for hours until he found the proper Christmas tree. Somehow it just wouldn’t be Christmas for Dad without that long cold walk through the snow, pushing the ghost of his breath forward into the crisp morning air.
When I got older he’d let me tag along. Well, actually he’d tell me to tag along. In fact, now that I think of it he sort of dragged me everywhere I had to go to.
It was on my third tag-along-drag that he first told me the story.
I was complaining at the time. Back then I was good at complaining. Being as young as I was I did an awful lot of complaining about things that couldn’t ever be changed.
“What do we need an old Christmas tree for anyway?” I asked. “Why don’t we just buy one at the lot downtown?”
Dad just kept on walking, moving those snowshoes through the snow like he was fixing to hike to Alaska.
“Leaves and needles grow on trees,” he told me. “Not money.”
“If we bought ourselves an artificial tree we could stay inside and keep warm. They last forever.”
He looked at me like I was seven kinds of stupid. Not in a mean way, just in a Dad kind of way.
Even then I knew the difference.
“If that’s what you call lasting,” he said. “I’ll settle for what comes first.”
I had to bite.
“So what comes first?” I asked.
“What’s real, that’s what comes first,” Dad said. “Something that you can believe in is what you want to have and hold on to.”
“Try holding on to a tree and all you’ll catch is splinters in your hand,” I pointed out.
I wasn’t trying to be smart. I just sounded that way, because I was awfully young, but Dad knew the difference too.
“Trees are special,” Dad said. “And pine and fir trees are even more special. They keep green all winter for a reason.”
“That’s because they’re conifers,” I said. “I learned that in school.”
“You learn a lot of things in school,” Dad said. “Some are more important than others.”
“So why do they keep green?”
“They keep green because they’ve been blessed,” Dad said. “See them moving on the sky-line? The way they lean and sway in the wind? The old folk called them heaven painters. I just call them masterpieces.”
“Well maybe we could get them to paint the house next summer, instead of me and you,” I said.
Dad just looked me like I had discovered an eighth kind of stupidity.
“The evergreen is blessed,” he said. “Back in Bethlehem when the baby child was born the old king-trees all crowded around the stable to have a look and they pushed the little evergreen out of the way. The olive tree brought fat green olives and the palm tree brought dates but the little evergreen had nothing until the Christmas angel looked down and dropped a few stars from heaven on the evergreen’s boughs. The baby Jesus looked up and saw those stars all bright and shiny on those thickety green-whiskered branches and he up and laughed. So every winter, when the nights are as dark and long as you think they could ever get you look at the green promise of the Christmas tree, with the stars hung on the branches and everything just feels better.”
“So why do we have to feel better way the heck out here in the winter cold?” I asked.
“Because it’s out here, in the snow and the cold where you can hear the sound of the wind blowing and rattling through the needles of the evergreen - well, that’s just the sound of the Christ child laughing at the sight of all those Christmas
stars.”
The story had sounded like horse feathers and hogwash back then and it still did even now. All of those windy old stories aside, I missed my Dad and I missed my Mom. I know you aren’t supposed to be so silly – a man at fifty and all – but I missed them and it left a kind of lonely hole in my heart that I didn’t believe could ever get full again.
Yup, merry frozen Christmas, you bet.
What did I have to celebrate for?
I remembered two Christmases ago, when the cancer took Mom. I remember the beautiful woman with the soft girlish laugh, worn away to nothing more than a scarecrow. Dad kept watch by her bedside through the whole time, telling her jokes and stories to make her smile.
Then, after she passed away Dad stopped talking. He stopped even laughing. That was the year he stopped going to the saw mill. He wouldn’t even bother getting dressed. He just wore that old plaid housecoat that Momma gave him the Christmas before.
He moped around the house, stared out the window, and waited.
Then, the week before Christmas I got up to the smell of smoke. I went down to the living room and found my father there, on his knees before the fireplace hearth, burning that smelly old housecoat. He was crying and laughing at the same time, like he was glad to let go of that load he’d been carrying in silence the whole year long.
I just sat there for a while on the couch, looking at the bent back of the man who had taught me how to grow and stand tall, crouched now in the sorrow of having to learn to let go.
“I’m going to walk past Christmas,” he told me. “I don’t want you to see the holiday as a time of mourning. We’ll cut ourselves a tree and wrap a few presents and I’ll hang the stars in the window. Then, come the new year, I’ll walk a little further to where your Momma is waiting for me.”
Only he didn’t.
He couldn’t, I guess.
It was the first time I ever remember my Dad not keeping a promise to me.
He tiptoed up to Christmas’s door and on the night before Christmas he gave up the ghost.
It was funny, that.
Scrooge had three of them, ghosts, I mean.
