missing a note.
“I ain’t gonna hold on to it all night—”
“No ye ain’t, Scratch. Here, pour it in my mouth.”
“P-pour …”
“Right here in my mouth, dammit!”
The tall, skinny Hatcher bent a little at the waist, squatting slightly and contorting himself as he continued to play, lolling out his tongue as Scratch brought the big cup to his lips and slowly began to pour. He was amazed at just how little spilled out, what few drops dribbled down Jack’s chin, off his whiskers, and onto the fiddle.
When Hatcher began to sputter, Bass pulled the cup back.
“Now ye set it down on the rocks,” Jack instructed.
When he had that done, Bass straightened and yelled into Hatcher’s ear over the loud screech of the fiddle, the laughter and hooting of the men, “I know me that song.”
“Ye know this?” Jack shouted in reply. “Sing it with me.”
“Cain’t sing—”
“Sing it!”
“Told you—I ain’t no good—”
“Sing, goddammit, Scratch. Ain’t no one listening but me!”
Titus cleared his throat self-consciously, his eyes darting left, then right, nervous as a bride on her wedding night.
Hatcher prodded him, “Sing the song with my fiddle notes.”
Reluctantly, Scratch began.
Titus never had thought he had a bad voice. Rather, he was merely shy of using it in the hearing of others. He couldn’t remember the last time he had sung when folks were around. That is, except when his mam took him and his brothers and sister to Sunday meeting and they all were raised singing those songs settlers on the frontier memorized in early childhood. But this tune was something he had heard others sing around campfires those long- ago summer evenings at the Boone County Longhunter Fair, heard again while rocking on Amy Whistler’s porch of an early autumn evening, heard even at his family’s hearth before a merry fire as the long winter night deepened in the Kentucky forest around their farm.
This was a song not about church and ancient biblical characters in a time distant and dim, not a song about things religious and mysterious … no, at this moment he was singing a song about a subject most boys came to understand as they grew to manhood. A song about women—a matter even more mysterious than religion.
“Damn, if ye don’t have ye a fine voice after all, Titus Bass!” Hatcher roared over the cry of his fiddle.
Now he blushed, made all the more self-conscious as Hatcher kept right on scratching out the melody to the song. He took a drink to hide the flush of embarrassment.
“Gimme drink,” Jack ordered.
When Bass took the cup from Hatcher’s lips as the song sailed on, Jack asked, “What else ye know?”
“Songs?”
“Any other’ns?”
“A few I might recall, if’n I heard the tune.”
“How ’bout this’un?”
And with that Hatcher immediately slipped into a new melody without lagging a note. After a few moments Bass realized he knew this one too. As he began to sing, Simms and Rowland came over with their cups; then others began to walk up, stopping to listen to Bass’s singing.
How he had come to love this song in that first youthful blush of manhood—if not for the lament expressed by those melancholy words he had come to know by heart so many years ago, then he loved the song because of the delicate way the notes slid up and down the scale, all of them blended this night by the bow Jack Hatcher dragged across those taut gut strings.
I
More company men came up now, falling quiet as they came to a stop in a loose ring around Hatcher and Bass, listening intently. From the looks on their hairy, tanned faces, the glistening in their eyes as the firelight danced across them all, it was plain to read that every last one of these men had someone special left far, far behind. Many miles, and perhaps many years, behind.
Hardened men, all—softened for only a moment as the wistful notes of the fiddle blended with the plaintive words of one who has left behind a loved one oft remembered in quiet moments around a crackling fire here deep in the heart of the mountains, where only a bold breed dared live.
