Long Way Gone

by Charles Martin

  By one a.m. the frantic crowds and people trying to make themselves look busy had left and I was alone. The Ryman was dark save a single light on the stage, which the sound engineers left on every night in honor of those who’d stood there. I checked off my “final” list, double-checked the doors, and wandered to the stage. Daley Cross’s band had left their instruments onstage, and given the multiple security guards posted around the block, they weren’t going anywhere.

  Next to Daley’s microphone stood her guitar. A McPherson. It was really difficult for me not to put my hands on a McPherson. So I picked it up, slid the strap over my neck, and began running my fingers up and down the neck and strumming out a few chords. It was both aesthetically and acoustically beautiful. Melodious. Rang like a bell and filled the air with a sonic tapestry. It sounded so good and leant itself to a fingerpicking style . . . so I dug back in my memory and began playing a song I’d written years ago about the storm that threatened to rip the tents apart and how Dad had lifted me out from underneath the bench and told me to “let it out.”

  Though I’d initially written it on a piano, I’d transposed it. It sounded especially good on a guitar because over the years I’d learned how to simultaneously flat-pick and strum the strings while also tapping the body of the guitar in a percussive, drumlike rhythm that created the feeling of a coming violent storm. The style I’d developed allowed the listener to both hear and feel the music through the use of contradicting major and minor chords.

  Minor chords are sad, anxious, heavy. They grab your attention in that by their very nature they are uncomfortable. Disconcerting. They make you want to run for your life. Major chords are happy, warm, full, light, and triumphant. They make you want to do the impossible. The first would lead us to the second. But to get to triumphant and resolute, we had to endure anxious and fearful.

  The second way I accomplished this style was to use an actual sound from the storm. A shrill whistle that I’d learned from Dad. In an odd mixture of physics and sheer volume, he could curl his tongue and press his lips tight to his front teeth and blow. Actually, shrill doesn’t even come close to describing the sound. As a kid I’d spent countless dizzying hours mastering it.

  If I played it right you could hear the thunder rumble, lightning crack, tent rip; then a rising crescendo replaced that uncertainty, lifting you and erasing the memory. Then before you knew it, the storm had faded and you were galloping atop notes that reached out from the stage, wrapping you in their arms and shaking off the fear.

  It’s a song about promise. Gifting. Calling. About identity. And, I guess, it’s a song about how music is sometimes the only thing that will silence the raging storm in us. My dad had always loved that song.

  Three verses, a bridge, and a chorus later, I finished playing, retuned the low E string to a drop-D tuning, the way I’d found it, and was about to set the guitar back in its stand when I heard the sound of someone clapping quietly.

  The hair rose on my neck. “Hello?”

  The clapping quieted.

  “Somebody there?”

  A woman’s voice responded. Her two words betrayed a weariness. “Just me.”

  I began retracing my steps in my mind. Had I locked all the doors? Had she been here the entire time? Who was she? I considered dropping the guitar and running. I tried to sound like I had some authority. “Ma’am, this building is closed for rehearsal.”

  A chuckle. “Thank goodness.”

  While I tried to sound in charge, I’m afraid my voice took on a hand-caught-in-the-cookie-jar tone. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  I could hear the smile on her face as she spoke. “Sure, just as soon as you put down my guitar.”

  Ouch. I really had been caught with my hand in the cookie jar. I placed it quietly in its stand. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  She rose from her seat in the back of the auditorium and began making her way toward me. “Don’t worry. You play it a lot better than I do.”

  I had not watched her evening sound tests because I’d had my head buried in replacing some lightbulbs, but her voice was unmistakable. Daley Cross was a good five inches shorter than me, but she did not seem to know this. She made her way across the stage, hands behind her back, and looked up at me. I waved my hand across her guitar. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hurt it. You can—”

  “That’s a beautiful song.”

  I figured I’d try the play-dumb approach—which was extraordinarily stupid given that I was standing on a stage and had been holding her guitar while my echo faded off the walls. “Song?”

  She smiled and circled me, singing the chorus back to me. “ ‘Let it out . . .’ ” She quit singing as abruptly as she began. “Where’d you hear that?”

  I chewed on my lip a second, asking myself just how honest I wanted to be with her. “In my head.”

  She looked up at me. Surprised. “You wrote it?”

  I wasn’t sure where this was going or how my answer might contribute to me losing my job. If my boss knew I’d been rather cavalier with what had been entrusted to me for safekeeping, I was pretty sure she’d fire me on the spot. My instructions had been pretty clear: “Clean up, lock up, touch nothing. Whatever you do, don’t, under any circumstances, mess with the musicians’ instruments. Don’t even breathe on them. Ever.”

  And Riggs had vouched for me, which made it even more troublesome. I could lose both jobs.

  I waved my hand across the stage. “Nothing’s missing. You can check. I was just locking up and—”

  “Where’d you get the music?”

  “I can’t afford to lose this job.” I scratched my head. “So if you could just forget—”

  “Where’d you learn to play like that?”

  I rubbed my hands together. “Listen, Miss, um—”

  She held out her hand. “Daley. I’m playing here tomorrow night.” She looked at her watch. “Or tonight.”

  Our conversations were walking in circles around each other. I said, “I feel like I’m talking about one thing and you’re talking about another.”

  She pointed behind her. “I couldn’t find an unlocked door, so the rent-a-cops let me in.”

  That explained it. Sucker punched by security. “Oh.”

  “Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me. Provided—” She stood across from me, motioning for me to pick up her guitar. “Please.” She smiled, walked off the stage, sat in the front pew, and pulled her knees up into her chest. “You play that again. Just like last time.”

  “You’re not mad about me playing your McPherson?”

  She waved me off. “My producer gave me that. Said he thought it matched my voice.”

  I turned the guitar in my hands. “Nice producer.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s a ten-thousand-dollar guitar.”

  “He can afford it.”

  “How long have you been sitting there?”

  “Long enough.”

  I sat on a stool and folded my hands in my lap. “Couldn’t we both go home and forget this? I’ll walk you back to your—”

  A single shake of her head. “Can’t sleep.” She wrapped her arms tighter around her knees and waited, warding off a cold wind I couldn’t feel. She looked both bone-tired and soul-weary.

  “So all I have to do is sing this one time and we can both go home and you’ll forget we ever met?”

  She smiled.

  My fingers rolled quietly across the strings. “That’s not an answer.”

  “We can go home, but I doubt I’ll forget.”

  “So, you are mad?”

  She rested her chin on her knees. “In the last six months I’ve listened to hundreds of demos. Maybe more. None of them touched me as deeply as your song.”

  I muted the strings. “Can I ask you one question?”

  “Sure.”

  I eyed the photoshopped glamour posters along the wall. The one where the unseen fan at her feet pushed back her glis
tening hair. “Is she listening? Or are you?” I looked back at the front row, my fingers tapping the strings.

  She let out a breath, and the square edge of her shoulders melted into a relaxed round. “I’m listening as me.”

  So at two a.m. in the Ryman, with nothing but air between us, I lifted my voice and played for an audience of one—offering my song out across the world that lay before me—and the well-constructed walls of two broken strangers came tumbling down.

  When I finished, she shook her head and wiped her face on her sleeve. She sat there a minute, slouching in the seat, closing her eyes, resting her head against the back of the pew. For almost a minute she said nothing while one toe tapped unconsciously.

  Finally she stood. “Thank you.” She crossed her arms again like the cold wind had returned. She half turned and spoke over her shoulder. “Very much.”

  She had made it to the exit when I hollered after her, “Hey, would you—”

  She turned.

  “Would you sing it with me?”

  She took a step back toward me. “Really? You wouldn’t mind?”

  I stepped to the side, out of the direct rays of the single light shining down. “No.”

  She nodded. “I’d like that.” She came back and climbed the steps leading onto the stage. “You teach me the words?”

  I slid the notebook from behind my back and opened to the page.

  She pointed to the Nashville Number System. “You understand this?”

  “I can get by.”

  “The guys in my band are always telling me I need to learn it, but it’s Greek to me.” She read through the words again, finally brushing the pen strokes on the page with her fingertips. “Beautiful.” She looked up. “Where’s it come from?”

  “My dad was . . . is a tent preacher. I was just a kid. A bad storm rolled in. Lightning caught the tent on fire. Thunder everywhere. I hid under the piano bench. Sideways rain stinging my face. People scattering like ants. My dad reached down and lifted me up with one arm, set me on the bench, pointed to my heart, and whispered in my ear—”

  She finished the sentence by singing, “Let it out.”

  “It was the first time I played before a group of any size.”

  “I think I would like your dad.”

  I worked my way through the intro and nodded for her to come in. She started quietly, breathing in the guitar, breathing out my song. Her voice was custom-made for it. She had the range and the volume to toy with the verses, which she refrained from doing, I suspected, for fear of hurting my feelings. By the time I started playing the second verse, she’d opened up her lungs and sung my song back to me.

  When the last note faded, we sat quietly. One minute. Then two. Finally she raised an eyebrow. “How’d that sound? Was that okay?”

  She’d had a rough go lately. Too many negative responses. Like a dog that’s been on a leash so long that even when you take it off it won’t walk beyond the length of the chain.

  Her singing my song was one of the more beautiful things I’d ever heard. I tried to figure out how to tell her that without sounding like her growing and adoring fan base.

  “I’ve always thought that the best voice is not the one that can sing the most octaves, or the loudest, longest, whatever . . . but the one who makes us believe that what he or she is singing is true.”

  She relaxed a notch. “Well, did you? Believe?”

  I laughed. “Yes.”

  She smiled like she too had been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. She eyed the doors and spoke softly. “Want to do it again?”

  We played it through five times straight. Each time she grew more comfortable, making it more and more her own. On the sixth time she owned it altogether, and I both heard and watched her find her voice.

  And her song.

  When she finished, her eyes smiled in concert with her lips. “Thank you.” She gently closed my black book, handed it back to me, and slid her hands into her jeans. “Thanks for letting me sing your song. It’s . . . yeah, just wow.” She pushed the hair out of her face and looked at her watch. “I better get going. Long day ahead.” She stepped off the stage and began walking toward the exit.

  I hopped off the stage and walked after her. “Daley?” I shook my head. “I mean, Miss Cross.”

  She stopped. A hardened exterior had returned, and she looked like she had already begun fighting the day’s battles.

  “Can I ask you something else?”

  “Sure. And it’s Daley.”

  “Do you like the music that you play?”

  She shook her head matter-of-factly. “Not really. But I sing it in the hopes that doing so will allow me to sing what I like one day.”

  I opened my book, tore out the perforated page, and handed it to her. “Your band shouldn’t have any trouble. Everything they need is—”

  She shook her head. “I can’t. I mean, I couldn’t poss—”

  I held out a stop-sign hand. “You sing it better than I do. Unless you don’t—”

  “No.” She clutched the paper to her chest. “I do. It’s just . . . words like these are . . . I feel like I’d be stealing something sacred.”

  “It’s yours.”

  “You must let me buy it from you.”

  I waved my hand across the stage. “Given my experience here in Nashville, I highly doubt anything will come of my dreams, but I think you should keep dreaming yours. I grew up in a world where music wasn’t hoarded. It was shared. All the time.” I chuckled. “My dad used to say it’s like that proverbial candle that you don’t hide. You set it on a table where everyone can see it. Where it gives light.” I slid my hands into my pockets. “You’re the only real light I’ve seen in a dark five years.” I paused. “I write the music that I need to hear. Only when I give it away can someone else sing it back to me.”

  “That would make you different from most everyone else in this city.”

  “Music is an offering.”

  She held the song tight. “Where can I find you?”

  “I’ll be back here tonight. Cleaning up the mess you and your band leave. Preparing for the next act.” I pointed. “My day job is across the alley. Riggs’s. I’m never far.”

  A gentle smile. “What do you do?”

  “Try to make guitars sound like the voices that own them.”

  She laughed. “Figures.” She pointed at my notebook. “You also wait tables?”

  “No. Why?”

  “The way you tuck that thing behind your belt at your back.”

  I turned it in my hands. It was worn, with tattered edges, and had taken on the natural curve of my lower back. “Old habit.”

  “What all do you write in there?”

  “Stuff I don’t want to forget.”

  A sly smile. This time I was pretty sure she was flirting. “You’re being vague.”

  “Just songs.”

  “So you have more?”

  “Yes.”

  Her voice softened. “You always this honest?”

  “No. Sometimes I lie.”

  She eyed the single page in her hand, then extended it slowly into the empty space between us. “Speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  I wasn’t sure about a whole lot in life, but I was absolutely certain that Daley Cross was made to sing that song. “Keep it.”

  I led her toward the door, unlocked it, and pushed it open, holding it while she walked through. When she did, she brushed my arm with her hand, then my stomach. It was a purposeful touch, as curious as her questioning. Something in her wanted to know if I was real. It was also an unspoken acknowledgment that we’d just shared something that words couldn’t ever encapsulate. No matter how long we stood there and racked our brains and tried to come up with a synthesis, there were no words for what we’d just experienced.

  People who make music together know this. Talking about it never gets at the heart of what’s been shared.

  When she turned, the breeze caught her hair and pulled it acro
ss her face. She tucked it behind an ear. “What’s your name?”

  I extended my hand. “Cooper. But folks ’round here just call me Peg.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Peg?”

  “My dad used to say that my mom was his anchor. Like a tent peg. And I reminded him of her. The name stuck.”

  “Sounds like a tender love story.”

  “To hear my dad tell it, it was that.”

  “I’d like to hear more about them.”

  “That almost sounds like you’re asking me out.”

  “It’s the least I can do.”

  Something in me that had been frowning for a few years smiled. “I’d like that.”

  “After the show, then.”

  23

  Riggs kept me busy most of the day. After lunch, he noticed my good mood. I think I’d been whistling. “You’re in good spirits. Got a hot date or something?”

  I shrugged. “Or something.”

  He smiled at me over a Martin he was working on. “Do tell.”

  I waved him off and stared out in the alley toward the Ryman. “You wouldn’t believe me. Better just wait and see how it pans out.”

  I worked through lunch, but my mind was next door. When Riggs came back from lunch, he said the place was buzzing with people. A producer named Sam Casey was crazy about a new song that his new girl Daley Cross had sung for him early this morning. He heard it once, got on the phone, and immediately began making major changes to the set. Trucks were brought in. The place was crawling with electricians and audio-video people. Set designers from one of the top touring rock-and-roll big-hair bands had been paid a lofty fee to drop everything and oversee the overhaul.

  I didn’t know what limitations the Mother Church of Country Music put on its shows, but it sounded like this one would push the boundaries.

  By the time I showered, slapped my face with aftershave, and walked through the back door of the Ryman around seven thirty, the seats were full and folks were standing up along the wall in the balcony. Word had spread, as evidenced by the number of cameras and glad-handing glittering celebrities. I’d only seen it like this a few times before, and that usually involved folks who’d been in the business awhile. This could be one to remember.