by Ronald Kidd
CHAPTER 3
The stars were spread across the sky like Arnie’s jacks on the living room floor, times a billion. Did God play games? Was he up there scattering the stars, then bouncing a ball and scooping them up? You win—here’s a happy life. You lose—goodbye, Sister.
My science teacher, Mr. Wafford, said the stars are so far away that the light we see today is from millions of years ago. For all we know, the stars have exploded and we just don’t realize it yet. We keep preaching and praying on Saturday night, talking to a God who could be destroying worlds as we speak. It’s something to think about.
I was looking at the stars because, inside the tent, healing had broken out. In the middle of his sermon, Daddy had pulled little Jerry Witherspoon from the tenth row, and Jerry had limped forward. He had broken his leg on the school playground, and Daddy proposed to fix it, like Jesus did in the Bible.
Daddy asked the congregation to come forward and help, which meant laying their hands on Jerry. I knew for a fact that when people came forward, Lester Collins laid his hands on Bobbie Jo Bainbridge, and I seriously doubt that any healing happened.
I wasn’t in a healing mood, so when the people crowded forward, I sneaked out the back. I made my way across the wet grass to a low stone wall behind the tent, sat down, and gazed at the stars.
It was a warm June night. The crickets were chirping. All around me, little yellow lights flickered on and off. They were lightning bugs. I noticed they flew in a zone, not too low and not too high. They knew what to do and where to do it. It was built into them. I wished I had a zone. I wanted to do things but didn’t know what.
I thought about going to the graveyard, across the street from our house. It was an ancient place, called East Hill Cemetery. Generations of Bristol folks were buried there, including Joseph R. Anderson, who founded and named Bristol in 1852. One end of the cemetery was taken up by Confederate and Union soldiers who died in the Civil War.
I think the cemetery was one reason Daddy had picked our house. Death had brought us to Bristol that rainy night when Daddy had latched on to Sister’s grave. And someday death, he figured, would take us away. It could happen in an instant, like a blessing, if you just keeled over. Or maybe, if you turned your back on God, you’d be swept away in a holy wind or consumed in a ball of fire. Either way, the cemetery would be right there, waiting.
Me, I found it peaceful. When I finished my chores, sometimes I’d head across the street and wander among the graves, touching the stones, tracing the names with my finger, trying to imagine who was buried there—a child the age of Sister, a soldier in uniform, someone like me.
There were voices from the tent. Daddy prayed, and the people clapped and called encouragement. Constance Carpenter babbled God knows what. There may have been a bark.
I heard music.
For a moment I thought it was coming from the tent, but of course that couldn’t be. I listened more closely and realized the music came from beyond the wall. There were trees back there and a hill with a house on top. The house had been vacant when we had raised the tent, but recently some workers had come and started fixing up the place. They had finished, and a few weeks ago a family had moved in. Somebody said they were rich.
I swung around on the wall until I straddled it. On one side, people shouted and praised Jesus. On the other side, thin and wispy, fluttering like a leaf in the breeze, was Satan’s tune, or so Daddy said.
I listened for a while. There was something different about the music, something tinny and brittle. It glittered in the night, closer than the stars, beckoning. I swung my leg over the far side of the wall, hopped off, and headed up the hill.
I picked my way among the trees, and the sound grew louder. When I got clear, I saw the house. It was a big, old place. What I remembered as broken down had been fixed up. The breeze blew, and I caught a whiff of cedar and sawdust.
A window, brightly lit, had been opened to let in a breeze. Under the window were some bushes. I made my way across the backyard and crouched beside them.
The sound was close but somehow far away. There was a fiddle and a guitar. The singers were men. They sang about a hammer and a drill, about steel and a worker who wanted to beat it down.
The melody twirled around my head, and somehow it mixed with Mama’s song. Music seemed to be telling me something—where I came from, where I was going, or where I could escape to if I ever worked up the nerve. The music was deep and dark and mysterious. It contained answers, and I was full of questions.
When the song finished, a voice said, “That was Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, singing ‘John Henry.’ This is the WSM Barn Dance, broadcasting from downtown Nashville, Tennessee, brought to you by the National Life and Accident Insurance Company.” The man kept talking, but my mind was in the clouds above the house, over the mountains, flying west to Nashville, a place I’d heard of but had never been to.
I was listening to a radio. It sat just out of sight over the windowsill. I knew that science had made it, like it had made the telephones and automobiles and telescopes that Mr. Wafford explained in school. Of course, science was something Daddy had no use for—didn’t like it or trust it or want it around. I asked him about it once, and he just laughed.
“Science?” he said. “Why, that’s just a cheap suit that Satan wears.”
At the time I didn’t say anything, but I wondered. In a way, wasn’t science like Daddy’s church? It was spirit and spark and maybe even healing, without the hocus-pocus. Science allowed you to do things. You could hear people talk and sing from miles away. You could get people excited, but not about some fever dream. This was real.
Listening in the night, I wondered what the radio looked like and what the music was saying to me. I decided to find out.
CHAPTER 4
June was hot that year. Arnie and I went barefoot and wrestled in the grass. I won, of course. Arnie didn’t mind. It was something to do when school was out and we were dodging Mama and Daddy, trying to avoid chores.
The following Monday morning, Mama made pancakes. She used cornmeal and served them with honey. Pancakes meant she was in a good mood, maybe because something nice had happened or maybe just because the sun was shining.
Daddy came into the kitchen, sneaked up behind her, and kissed her neck. She laughed. I looked at Arnie and gave him a pretty good eye roll.
“It’s the Lord’s day,” boomed Daddy, like he was preaching in the tent.
“I thought that was Saturday,” said Arnie.
Daddy grinned. “Saturday’s the Sabbath. Every day’s the Lord’s day.”
Mama served the pancakes and brought out hot coffee for her and Daddy. Arnie grabbed the honey and started pouring.
“Whoa,” said Mama. “Leave some for the rest of us.”
Daddy pounced on his pancakes, then looked up at Arnie and me. “Good crowd Saturday night, huh? Went through a stack of communion cups. What say we form a wash brigade?”
Daddy was always forming brigades. He was at war with Satan, but also with his own odd list of taboos: dirt, sloth, fancy clothes, and anything that started with the letter X, which he said was godless and unnatural, such as xylophones and X-rays. When he formed brigades, I usually headed the other direction. I tried to do that after breakfast, but Daddy outsmarted me and was waiting in the backyard. He clamped a hand on the back of my neck and marched me into the tent, where Arnie was already working.
We washed communion cups, folding chairs, and a dozen other things that looked clean enough to me. It seemed that Daddy could spot dirt we never saw.
“It’s the Jesus eye,” he explained as we worked. “I see dirt. I see flaws. Mostly, I see sin. It’s all around us, boys. Jesus hates it. He wants me to root it out.”
I wondered if Jesus actually talked, and if he did, what he sounded like. Did his voice boom like Daddy’s or sigh like Mama’s? When he got excited, did he bark or chirp? How come he talked to Daddy but not to me?
The wash brigade took a break for
lunch, then dove back in. Daddy said the folding chairs were still dirty, so Arnie and I set to work on them while he fiddled with something in back. I thought of the music I’d heard through the window and how it had made me smile.
“You know,” I told Arnie as we cleaned, “singing isn’t so bad. People sing in some churches.”
“It’s a sin,” he said.
Arnie had taken to following Daddy around like a disciple. If I wanted to get Arnie’s goat, I’d call him Jesus Junior.
I wiped off a chair. “Angels sing. It says so in the Bible.”
Arnie kept working.
“Mama sings,” I said.
He stopped and glared at me. “Liar.”
“It’s true.”
“Mama wouldn’t do that,” he declared.
“I heard her. I saw her.”
“I don’t believe you.”
I shrugged and went back to work but could tell Arnie was bothered.
Finally, he asked, “What did she sing?”
I thought of the tune and the words but didn’t want to tell Arnie. Somehow it seemed private. “Just a song. I thought it was pretty.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why is music a sin? If you step outside the tent, lots of people sing.”
Arnie shook his head, hard.
I said, “Why does Daddy hate music? Don’t you think that’s strange?”
“Music is bad. It’s evil.”
“I like it,” I said.
I wondered if God was listening. For all I knew, a bolt of lightning was headed my way. I glanced at Arnie, and he fixed me with a stare. Maybe he had the Jesus eye too. When he watched me, I wondered what stains he saw, what was dirty and needed to be cleaned.
We went back to our chores. Finally, later that afternoon, Daddy inspected our work and pronounced it done. Arnie ran off to look for candy. Daddy went hunting for Mama. I checked to make sure they were gone, then made my way toward the big house.
This time, instead of climbing the hill in back, I went around the block on Taylor Street to the front of the place. It was like being in a different town. Just a block away from our little, patched-together cottage, on top of the hill, was a row of big, fancy homes. They lined Taylor and the adjacent streets, which were named for the trees that years ago had made the town wealthy and now were barely keeping it afloat—poplar, spruce, cypress.
I approached the big house, a place made of brick and stone, with a new roof and freshly painted wooden shutters. It had a circular driveway and a separate garage off to one side. There was a tall iron gate, which was odd because there was no fence, just the gate, like it was more of an idea than an actual barrier.
The gate was shut, so I walked around it. A boy my age was sitting on the front steps, looking out. He had neatly combed black hair, big ears, and a pointed nose. I studied him for a minute, then took a deep breath and ventured up the walk toward him.
He watched me all the way, and his expression never changed. His face seemed to say, Do something. Impress me.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
“You’re new, aren’t you?”
He nodded. “I’m Grayson Lane. People call me Gray.”
Gray stuck out his hand, and I shook it. It felt good. It felt normal. Some people shake hands. Other people, like Daddy, just shake. He vibrated when the spirit took him, like he’d stuck his finger into an electrical socket. Folks loved it. They thought it showed he was filled up with God.
“Sit,” said Gray. It sounded like a command, like he was used to people doing what he wanted.
I stepped forward and perched on the step beside him, wondering how long he would let me stay. I glanced around nervously. “Big porch. Big house.”
He shrugged.
I said, “I’m Nate Owens.”
“What do you think of this place?” he asked.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Not the house. The town. Bristol, Tennessee. Bristol, Virginia. Whatever you call it.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“My father’s Archibald Lane.” He waited for a reaction.
“I guess I don’t know who that is.”
“You’ve heard of the Bristol Door and Lumber Company?” he asked.
“The lumber mill? Sure. My daddy used to work there. Half the town still does.”
“They brought in my father to run it. That’s why we’re here.”
I remembered overhearing my parents talk about it. According to Daddy, the lumber mill was struggling, like most businesses in town. The only ones doing well were clothing companies like Big Jack, which made overalls, and nearly all their workers were women. The lumber mill needed to turn things around, and they had hired some hotshot from Lexington to do it. I guessed Mr. Lane was the hotshot. Daddy had said something else too. I passed it along to Gray.
“I hear the lumber mill workers are starting a union,” I said. “They’re trying to get fair wages.”
Gray looked at me. His gaze was icy. “My father can handle that.”
I shivered and wondered exactly what he meant. As I thought about it, somebody started singing. The sound was tinny and distant, like I’d heard on Saturday night, but it was a far cry from Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers. It sounded like what they called opera.
“Is that a radio?” I asked.
Gray smiled, and the ice melted. “Want to see it?”
“Could I?”
“Sure,” he said. “Of course, there’ll be an admission fee.”
I stared at him, and Gray laughed. “That was a joke. Come on inside and I’ll show you.”
CHAPTER 5
It was a beautiful thing, made of what looked like red maple, one of the trees milled in the mountains outside Bristol. It came up to my shoulder and was polished to a sheen. At the top were some switches and a round dial with numbers. On the dial, it said Zenith. Below that was a row of curved wooden slats with fabric in between.
I’d seen a radio before, at the furniture store downtown. The store manager, Cecil McLister, had tried to sell me one. Mr. McLister knew I was only thirteen years old and was that crazy preacher’s kid, but he still had tried to sell me a radio. I liked that. Of course, Daddy wouldn’t have allowed me near it, but Mr. McLister didn’t know that. As far as Daddy was concerned, the radio was doubly sinful: it was made by science, and music might come out.
Gray’s radio was as nice as Mr. McLister’s—maybe nicer. His family had put it in a sitting room at the back of the house. Next to it was the open window I had crouched below on Saturday night. A warm breeze blew in, ruffling the lace curtains.
In front of the radio sat a woman, knitting. She was pretty. Her dress was light and silky, and her hair was done up in what people called a bob. Supposedly it was the latest style, but we didn’t see much of it around Bristol. I noticed that her hands were smooth and white, not rough like Mama’s, though she and Mama were about the same age. I thought of Mama washing dishes and had trouble imagining this woman at the sink.
“This is my mother, Isadora Lane,” Gray told me. “Mother, this is…What did you say your name was?”
“Nate Owens. Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”
She cocked her head. “Owens—isn’t it the preacher’s name?”
“Yes, ma’am. Wilvur Owens is my father.”
An unpleasant look crossed her face, like you might get if somebody had a bad rash.
“Sometimes we can hear him preaching from our house,” she said. “He’s got quite a voice.”
I shifted uncomfortably. On the radio, the music changed. The opera stopped, and a banjo started. Mrs. Lane, who didn’t seem like the banjo type, frowned and gathered up her knitting.
“I have some other things to do. It was good to meet you, Nate.”
I watched her go. “Does she really like opera?”
Gray said, “In Lexington, she was chair of the Opera Guild.”
“The singing sounds screechy to me. I lik
e banjos better.”
He sneered. “Hillbilly music?”
“Mountain music,” I said. I had heard it in town, fiddles and harmonies drifting out of restaurants and off people’s porches. The music had a rough, rugged quality, like the hills around Bristol. Sometimes, when the harmony was just right, you could hear the wind blowing through the canyons.
I approached the radio, knelt down in front of it, and listened. When the fiddling stopped, the announcer said it was somebody named Uncle Jimmy Thompson, playing with a group called the Fruit Jar Drinkers. They started another song. I liked what they were doing, even if Daddy thought it was Satan’s work—or maybe because it was Satan’s work. The music was rough, like Mama’s hands, but it seemed simple and honest.
Besides the music, I liked the radio itself. It was parts and pieces and energy, put together to create something useful. Through it, you could overcome distance, pull in sounds through the air, and hear people singing from miles away. It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t wild, like church. It was science. Voices poured out based on scientific principles, laws as unbreakable as the Ten Commandments—maybe more so. Daddy would swat me if I said it, but it was true.
“What do you think?” asked Gray, beaming proudly.
“I want one,” I said.
“Talk to your father.”
I smiled, then saw that he was serious. My father, who loomed so large in my life, was barely a speck in Gray’s, just a voice drifting up the hill. Gray didn’t seem to know about the tent or the sign, and obviously he hadn’t heard about Daddy’s views on music.
Thinking about it, I realized that Gray’s house wasn’t just on a hill. It was in a different world, where I wasn’t the crazy preacher’s son but could be someone new, someone of my own making. I wasn’t sure yet what I thought of Gray, but I liked his house and the way it made me feel.
Gray said, “My father loves new things. When he saw this radio, he had to have it. He paid cash, and a few hours later we were listening to it right here in this room.”
“Opera?” I said.
“Well, it sure wasn’t hillbilly music.”
