Long Way Gone (10 page)

Dad laughed. “We start parking cars at four Friday.”

The man laughed. “Mister, I'll he'p you park ever' last one.”

O
ne unintended outcome was that the resulting waterfall could be seen from the highway more than a mile away, creating an easily recognizable landmark. Word spread, the name caught, and our first weekend at “The Falls” was sold out—and memorable.

We started setting up tents on Thursday, the stage on Friday morning. When Friday noon rolled around, there was already a line of cars trailing out the gate. Dad loved parking cars. Said it was like putting his finger on the pulse of the congregation without their knowing that he was the doctor. He'd open a door, give them a hand, and ask folks how they were doing. By six o'clock he and Mr. Slocumb had parked several hundred cars.

In the lull before the service, Mr. Slocumb wiped his sweating face with a towel and said, “You like doing this, don't you, Preacher Man?”

Dad shrugged. “Years back I learned how to ask one question, and people will spill fifteen years' worth of pain in three minutes. Even the quiet ones will open the door to what hurts. And when they do . . . I try to listen.” He paused. “With the ears of my heart.” He borrowed Mr. Slocumb's towel, wiped off his face, and then waved his hand across the rancher's pasture. “People don't drive out here to the middle of nowhere to be entertained. There's better entertainment elsewhere. No, they make the drive because they're hurting. Broken.”

He pointed at the tent. “You think this is some strange circus tent
show, and I'm just some quack snake-oil salesman.” He shook his head. “This is triage.” A long silence followed. “It's where we stop the bleeding.”

I'd never seen so many cars or so many people. Big-Big started to play the piano. The choir was swaying, humming. Several lights were flickering over the stage, swaying in rhythm with the wind—which had, oddly enough, picked up all of a sudden. A bunch of the women were waving fans. Cooling themselves. Everyone was waiting. I don't know what they were expecting, but I doubt it's what they got.

Dad's booming voice rose up out of the back. From my seat on the edge of the stage I could see my dad, his face shining with sweat. Had a white sweat towel draped around his neck. Muddy shoes. No suit. No flashy tie. No gold rings. Just Jimmy hanging around his neck. I think Dad did that on purpose. Because when folks saw him, they immediately knew he was one of them.

Dad took his time making his way forward, slowly tapping out a rhythm on the body of the guitar. Making him both percussionist and guitar player. We never handed out song sheets because they were expensive to print, most ended up in the mud after the service, and if you played songs folks already knew, they didn't need them anyway.

Dad wound his way toward the stage like a corkscrew. By the time he reached the stage, everybody was standing and singing so loud they didn't even need him. He had started a wave with enough kinetic energy to carry itself to shore. A lot of the kids were standing on the chairs or sitting on their daddies' shoulders. Amidst a raucous chorus, Dad set Jimmy down and sat next to me, toweling his forehead. Big-Big kept playing at the piano. The volume beneath that tent was so loud it hurt my ears.

Near us, a lady pressed a baby to her bosom. Couldn't have been but a few weeks old. The mother rocked slowly, covering herself with a cloth diaper. A group of kids had come up front and were holding hands and
singing and dancing in a circle. Dad and I sat on the edge of the stage, blanketed in song. Big-Big softened his touch on the keys, and the choir quietly hummed. Soon the entire place was just humming along. Dad put his arm around my shoulder and spoke, looking out across more than a thousand people—all looking at him. Dad was smiling at the kids. “Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babes . . .”

Sometimes I felt like my dad spoke in riddles. Half the words were his. The other half he found in Scripture. This was one of those riddles I didn't understand for years to come. He saw the look on my face and he touched my vocal cords with the tip of his finger. He whispered, “God gave us pipes for a reason.”

I was too young to follow him. “What's the reason?”

He gently touched my chest with his index finger. “Music cuts people free.” A pause. “It silences the thing that's trying to kill us.”

The echo of his words had yet to fade when the wind suddenly changed direction. It was blowing right to left. As the words left his mouth, it changed from left to right. Like somebody had shut one door and opened another. That meant it was swirling. Which meant just one thing.

A storm.

In late fall, storms come on fast and they come on strong, with little warning. I saw a man's comb-over stand straight up like a rooster, and then the temperature dropped about fifteen degrees. The space between Dad's eyes narrowed and his forehead wrinkled. In the time it took to sing a single song, the sky had turned the color of India ink and lightning spider-webbed sideways across the mountain peaks. While I was asking myself,
I wonder what Dad's going to do,
the rain came. In sheets. In seconds, the rain was blowing sideways under the tent, stinging my face. The wind lifted the canvas like a sail and stretched the ropes attached to the pegs. A couple of the ropes snapped with a loud pop, and one corner of the tent ripped off and sailed out through the night sky like a giant Frisbee.

It was my first angry storm.

Lightning flashed above us, and a single bolt traveled down a dead
evergreen tree that had grown up against the cliffs. The tree lit like a candle dipped in gasoline, and sparks jumped from the tree to the tents, lighting the canvas on fire. As the canvas ceiling became a wall of fire, people scattered like cockroaches. Pandemonium. Folks were fighting, scrambling over each other to get to their cars. Slipping. Shoving each other out of the way. It was ugly.

And the rain was unlike anything I'd ever seen. Several inches in just a few minutes. And yet it seemed to have no effect on the fire. Then hail the size of golf balls began to fall, denting hoods and rooftops and driving everyone back underneath the tents. Folks were bleeding. One man ran back into the tent, blood dripping down his face and the front of his white dress shirt as he screamed something about the 'pocalypse and the end of the world.

I crawled beneath the piano bench, which had been vacated by Big-Big as he was trying to secure the tent corners. The only part of the tent not torn was covering the piano. Somehow the wind had cut the power to every light save one. A single bulb, powered by the batteries in the bus, swayed above the piano. I was witness to the second coming of Noah's flood, and the only two things dry within five square miles were Jimmy and that piano.

With the storm raging, wind ripping, rain stinging, hail cracking windshields, I remember lying there, wrapped up in a fetal ball, shaking and covering my ears with both hands to shut out the shrill whistle of the swirling wind.

For a moment I lost track of my dad. When I opened my eyes again, I found him kneeling, staring at me—his face inches from mine. Water dripping from his eyes, hair, and nose. Darkness and fire created the backdrop beyond him. His right arm reached in like a giant excavator, wrapped around me, and lifted me out. I wanted to cling to him, but he set me on the piano bench and then sat next to me. The wind was blowing so hard I had to lean into it to sit up straight. Dad brushed the wet hair out of his face, nodded at the piano, and spoke just three words. “Let it out.”

I tried to scream above the whistling wind. “What?”

He leaned in and spoke slowly so I could read his lips. “Let it out.”

I looked around at all those people. All those terrified faces. All that anger. That fear. I felt helpless. I'd wrapped one foot around the leg of the piano bench so the wind couldn't rip me off the face of the earth. I tried to touch the keys, but my hands were shaking.

Dad looked down at me. “Peg?”

I didn't answer. I was too scared. I wanted to run like everybody else.

He leaned in closer. His nose almost touching mine. “Son?”

“Yes, sir.”

He placed my hands gently on the keys. “Let it out.”

I looked down at my chest and shouted back, “Let what out?”

He smiled. “The part that makes the song.”

So I did.

My shaking fingers hit the keys, made the chords, and I played with every ounce of terrified strength within me. The harder that wind blew, the higher the flames climbed, the more the tent whipped in the air above me, the tighter I wrapped my foot around the leg of the bench and the louder I played. That dark storm had covered the sky, stretching ten miles in either direction, coming to rest in Mr. Slocumb's cattle field just beyond us.

We were next. Out on the prairie, five miles distant, lightning struck the ground and hit a propane tank the size of a semitrailer. The ignition caused a white flash that lit the darkness and rolled it back like a scroll. Followed by a sonic boom that nearly ripped me off the bench. Whatever emotion had filled me exploded out my fingers. As much a protective mechanism as an artistic expression, I played as loud and as hard as I could.

What I didn't realize was that while the storm had my attention, something else inside the tent had everyone else's. They weren't screaming. Weren't fighting. Weren't swinging chairs. In fact, they were just standing. Watching. And most of them were looking in my general direction. I looked at Big-Big, wondering what song he'd started, but
Big-Big was just standing there staring at me. He wasn't singing a lick. I looked up at Dad, but he wasn't singing either. He was just sitting there with his hands in his lap. Then I looked back at all those people, and while the storm raged around us, it had quit raining inside the metal framing of the tent. I say metal framing because most all the canvas had been ripped off. The rain streaked down my face, but when it hit my lips it tasted salty. My fingers were slinging water, but the piano was dry and everything around me was dry. That meant the water wasn't rain.

Somewhere in there I heard a sound. A beautiful sound. And I thought maybe I'd heard it before but maybe only in my dreams. It was like an echo around a corner. A siren in the distance. Something higher up. Only when I shut my eyes did I realize that the sound was me. I was singing. Singing at the top of my lungs. “O Lord my God . . .”

The sound of me surprised me.

Dad stood up, dug a pick from his pocket, hung Jimmy over his shoulder, and came up underneath me—his deep baritone filling in the space below my prepubescent voice. Big-Big reassembled the choir, which had voluntarily dispersed, and I don't really know what all happened next. In the thirty-six years since, I've tried to make sense of it, but I cannot. It does not make sense to my rational mind. But that's the thing about music. It doesn't enter through the mind. It enters through the heart.

There's a lot I don't know, but this is what I know for certain: the storm retreated before our very eyes and the torrent left as quickly as it had come. The night cleared, ten billion stars stared down on us, and the air took on that pungent, crisp earthiness known only after the rain. The people returned, righted their chairs, sat down, and acted civil. I don't know how long I played, but I know in the years to come Dad used to joke, “First song that boy ever played in public was an Elvis tune.”

My dad loved the King.

Dad followed the storm with his “We Are Not Alone” sermon. Which made good sense, given that we all just witnessed round one of the coming Apocalypse. But while Dad was talking about how “some
have entertained angels” and “therefore since we are surrounded by so great a host of witnesses,” my attention was focused on a man sitting on my piano. He had climbed up there during the storm. When Dad got to talking about Revelation
chapter 4
and how it's a picture of the throne room of God and how all the heavenly host are singing “Holy, Holy, Holy” 24/7, I wanted to raise my hand and say, “No, sir, they're not.” But I was pretty sure if I did, everyone, including my dad, would think I was crazy. So I kept my mouth shut, but I never took my eyes off the man on the piano.

Hours later, after everyone had gone and Dad and Mr. Slocumb had unstuck several cars and trucks with his tractor, Dad found me still sitting on that piano bench, where my feet didn't touch either the ground or the pedals. Dad put his arm around me. “Time for bed, big guy.”

“But what about—” I pointed.

Dad looked puzzled. He scratched his chin and sat next to me. “What about what?”

I was tired. Eyes heavy. I waved my hand. “What do we do about him?”

“Who?”

The guy was sitting just a few feet away. He smelled like rosemary. Long blond hair. Muscular. Green eyes. Smiling. For the last hour or so, he'd been dancing and shaking a tambourine, so his shirt was soaked through. Every now and then he'd glance over his shoulder at me.

I pointed. “Him.”