“Sure.” He pulled in underneath a stand of pine.
“Luther, I guess I better tell you right off, I came with the intention to stay. I have most everything I need in those suitcases. If you think I’m being too forward, I’ll understand. I don’t have anything in San Francisco I want, and seeing you, I know what I want is right here.”
Her hand lay on the seat between them, waiting to be held. He took her hand.
“Miss Pell, I would surely like to hold you.”
She came into his arms and they held each other, and kissed each other there in his pickup beneath the pines. They talked and romanced until the moon came up, then drove along to his father’s farm.
A month later Martin Luther Cole married Miss Janice Marie Pell at the Faith and Redemption Baptist church in Luthersville. Luther took her to his mountain, and they stayed. Occasionally he took out the violin. He held it and remembered, and it hurt, but he could bear the pain.
Luther Cole and Janice Pell Cole had five good years on the mountain before fate in the guise of something called the Asian flu came and took beauty from his life. Not satisfied with taking his wife, his father also died that year.
Folks below the mountain who had been getting to know Luther and Mrs. Cole, didn’t see him for two years. Some thought he’d died of heart break. In the mountains they knew a man or woman could be taken that way.
He came finally, to buy supplies, and people whispered. His hair hung below his shoulders and it was gray. Luther was still in his early thirties. He spoke to no one, even those who spoke to him.
It wasn’t a stretch of the imagination for folks to think him crazy. They knew pain. Being poor in the mountains of West Virginia often led to madness, great and small.
Chapter 8
LUTHERSVILLE, WEST VIRGINIA, SUMMER 1978
Ailey Barkwood played in the dust alongside an ancient sway-backed barn. As he played, he sang “Rock of Ages” at the top of his voice. Sammy Sue, the old black woman who looked after Ailey and his Grandfather, sat on the porch and shelled peas. She gazed across the fields to the forest, occasionally glancing toward the barn where Ailey sat in the dust and sang.
Against the mountains behind the forest, massive thunderheads marched away forever. Sammy Sue smiled. Her hands, separate from her thoughts, popped fresh peas from their green sheaths. The day before, Ailey asked her how far up the biggest cloud went: did it reach the moon?
She told him it went forever.
He nodded, his serious eyes looking toward the sky. He believed her.
Sammy Sue hummed along with the boy. “You’re a caution, Ailey Barkwood. I do believe you’re tuned sweeter’n the piano at the church.”
It was true. He slid over every third word and changed those he wasn’t sure of, but each note, each tone was faithfully rendered. He could have tuned the piano by ear. Ailey Barkwood wasn’t quite four years old.
Ailey’s grandfather, Joe Barkwood, pushed open the screen door and walked onto the porch. It slammed noisily behind him. Joe Barkwood once stood six foot four in his stockin’ feet; now he was bent by age and rheumatism. Despite the wear of sixty years in the sun and a thick shock of hair gone pure white, he and the boy were quite similar: long, narrow faces, square chins, and deep-set dark eyes.
Granpa Joe sat on a bench near Sammy Sue and rubbed his legs with large, square-knuckled hands. After a while he pulled a watch and chain from a pocket in the front of his overalls and snapped it open.
“About two minutes, Sammy Sue.”
“Uh, huh, Mistuh Joe.”
They both looked toward the boy playing in the dust. Two minutes later Ailey got up and banged his hands against his shirt and jeans. A cloud of dust rose in the still air and settled back like fleas to a hound. He ran toward the porch on legs too long for the rest of his body. He went immediately to his grandfather and stood by his knee.
“Can I git it, Grandpa?”
“You ain’t gittin’ nothin’, Ailey Barkwood, till you washes your face and hands,” Sammy Sue said.
His grandfather nodded. “You do like Sammy says, boy.”
Ailey frowned at such foolishness and muttered, “What do my hands and face have to do with ‘it’.”
When Ailey came out of the house two minutes later he looked like a raccoon. The front half of his face was reasonably clean, but further back was a brown ring of dirt. He stood in front of Sammy Sue impatiently.
She laughed, warm as sunshine, and put the bowl of peas on the porch by her chair.
“What’s the matter with you boy?” He shifted from one foot to the other. “Couldn’t you find the rest of your face?” Ailey didn’t answer.
“Did you bring the cloth?” she asked.
He held it behind his back and the instant she said cloth, handed it to her. She washed his face, all of it, then his arms and hands.
“There, I knew there was a little boy ‘neath there somewhere. ”
“Granpa?”
“Okay, Ailey, bring ‘er here.”
He dashed into the house and came out a moment later with an old Philco Transoceanic portable radio. An extension cord dragged behind. It was so big Ailey could barely carry it. He bit his lip with concentration and lifted it to a low table along the front of the porch. He took the cord back inside the house and plugged it in.
Back on the porch he looked at his grandpa. “Go ahead boy, find yer music.”
Saturday afternoon: and every Saturday afternoon at two o’clock, for two whole hours, WNEW New York played the classics, featuring the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
Neither Granpa Joe or Sammy Sue liked it much, but from the first moment Ailey heard it, he screamed and shouted when they tried to change the station. They were too old to fight such total anger.
Ailey handled the radio like a religious artifact, carefully turning the dial until he heard the familiar voice of the announcer. When he was satisfied he turned the volume up as far as it would go. By some oddity of atmospheric conditions and location, the station came in perfectly.
Ailey sat down and leaned against the wall of the house, an acolyte in the presence of the master. He had been doing this every Saturday for more than a year.
He learned the names of the instruments from a children’s concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Ailey’s intensity unnerved Granpa Joe and Sammy Sue. Old Joe Barkwood figured a boy ought to get worked up about a good Barlow knife or a baseball glove.
For Ailey, the rest of the world disappeared. The universe revolved around the porch of his grandpa’s house at the foot of Cole’s Mountain, West Virginia.
The opening piece was “The Moldau”, by Smetana, the most perfect evocation of a river from source to fullness ever set to music. He had listened to it three times. He knew every note. As the lilting song of the flutes marked tiny rills in the forests of Bohemia he formed the word, flutes, silently. And when the massed violins burst forth with the theme, his small body leaned forward trembling like a hunter on point.
He whispered, “violins”, as others would call the names of saints.
Two hours later, his head tilted back against the clapboard covered walls of the farmhouse, Ailey was still lost in the music. He would replay every note in his mind, over and over.
He got up, turned the radio off, and took it back in the house. Another Saturday had come and gone, the standard against which he measured