Wise Man

"I just want to learn to play the one song," he said.

Just to be sure I understood, I asked if that was the only thing he wanted to learn.

"That's right. There's this one song. And I want to learn it. Ain't no other a one I want to learn."

I met him one December day in the studio up in Bristol, where I was unrepentantly follying: recording a song to be played on loop in my casket after I die. (The best part of THAT trick is I expect to be cremated.) Anyway, there are frequently characters lounging on the fringes at the studio in Bristol, which you might expect from a place that records everything from ghettotech to truck-driving country to zombie rock to hardcore Southern gospel quartet.

These are for the most part non-musical characters who can teach you a lot of important things, e.g. the kinds of sharks drawn to your surfboard in Florida depending on whether you're hung over from tequila or whisky. And this guy was no exception. He was there with a friend who was recording his chickens so he could get pristine sound to lure trespassing coyotes, and sure enough, back there in the glass booth was a straw-filled box with a hen in it.

"You got to scare it up a little bit to get the right note of helplessness that a dog'll come to. Wild turkey or woodpecker's really best, but chicken's'll do in a pinch. Plus they're a whole lot easier to get in the studio."

He was from up in Virginia, up in Wise County "almost over to Lee County, where Virginia gets whittled into Kentucky," and he was telling me how to catch snapping turtles by sticking your hand in the air pocket of a muskrat den submerged in a creek bank. I was feeling all "Wind in the Willows" excited, learning this important thing, when he stopped and asked, "By the way, where do you live?"

I told him I lived down in Kingsport, and when he asked what part, I said I lived out in Colonial Heights; Kendrick Creek area.

"You don't know Boogaloo Ridge, do you?"

I asked if he meant Buckaloo Ridge, uphill from the creek; I live in a suburban development on the slope of that ridge.

"Hm," he grunted with a smile, as if there was something he knew. "My papaw's buried down there. On top of that very ridge, just up from the last gap to the south. It's hard to find. You can't see it from the road unless you know what you're looking for and all the leaves are down. Looks like a little chapel. I doubt you know it, but if you did know it, you'd know it."

I told him I liked to walk on the roads over the ridge for exercise, but I didn't know about his papaw's grave. That was when he said he wanted to learn the dulcimer. I was sitting warming up on one for my session, so it's not like the request was out of the blue.

"My papaw had him, oh, I don't know, a bunch that he'd made. I kick myself for not learning from him, but he was gone before I was really old enough to know any better. Anyway there was this one dulcimer that he had that was set up to play slide-style, not noter-style or finger-style, and there was this one song he played on it. And that's the one I want to learn. I just want to learn to play the one song."

We shook on the deal: I'd teach him the one song. I asked him what it was. I figured it'd be a commonplace, like "Amazing Grace."

"Nah, you don't know it," he said, shaking his head. He was silent a long moment, and then he asked, "When is Christmas?"

To say I was taken aback by the question is to put it lightly, but I hadn't conversed with a legion of studio characters in the course of my lifetime for nothing, so I deflected: "You tell me."

He weighed me a moment, as if he wanted to be sure I was deserving of hearing what he was about to say. Catching snapping turtles was one thing; Christmas was another.

"I mean," he began, "it could have been any day, right? We weren't there. You ever heard angel music? You live your whole life -- you work, you go to school -- and you just accept it like you accepted bell-bottoms or low-ride jeans or shooting people in the back because that's just the way it is, and don't tell me you don't!  Well, I ain't no different, really, except maybe in the fact that the one thing I could never accept was this one-day Christmas thing. I wanted Christmas to be all the time, and I mean the real thing, the birth of Jesus thing, with me as one of the Wise Men who'd just stick around and not return home by another way just to avoid Herod and let him slaughter the innocent. That's where we are, all the time, in a world that slaughters the innocent because adult nonsense is the millstone that we hang around all these babies' necks! Excuse my French here for a moment, but doesn't it piss you off that there's only one day a year when we say 'peace on earth, goodwill toward men,' and can't mean 'everybody' by that? And here we got people thinking they're punching a ticket for eternal life and meanwhile they go screwing up everybody else's lives. To hell with that! Man, you can look at me and know I don't have much. And you and me, our candles are burning now but for how much longer? You might not make it to dinner! Look at you, smiling at me like Mona Lisa. You probably think I'm some kind of a nut. Well, that song I want to learn, it's that song that makes me think this way. I never heard it outside my family. My papaw said he learned it from his papaw. I don't know if that's true, but …"

He was pretty much ranting, so I cut in to help him focus and asked him to sing the song for me, which he did. His voice was pitched real low -- it was a bass melody. Easy folk tune, nothing to it. Then I got him to sing it in snatches so I could get the words notate the melody.

As the story is told/it was a cold, starry night in winter/when a baby was born to a woman who'd known no man.As a boy he would never grow old/but he gave up his life for sinners/so the whole world might understand/the grave has no song to sing;/death has no sting;/our lives are a gift we bring when we live for one thing:/As the story is told, when we join our hearts together,/lift our voices in song,/give the gift that belongs/to the now and forevermore.

I was only just done when he said, "Hey you gotta go, there's Mike waving you in."

And there was Mike, the studio engineer, waving chickens out and me in. I went to work follying, and in the meantime the turtle-hunter left while I was in there. I haven't seen or heard from him since.

But I did go looking for his papaw's grave. The very next night I walked the road over the ridge and was where the power line cuts through close to the summit when I encountered thundersnow and an abandoned TV. How could that not mean something, right? So next day I went back and where the TV had been (it had apparently apotheosized) I cut down the ridge and bushwhacked over away from civilization down toward the last gap from the south. It was getting colder and clearing but still snowing some. I wound up going too far, all the way down to where there's a water tower, so I made my way back north and when I came to the first gap, I just got on the ridge line and followed it up, and there it was.

Just as he'd said, a little chapel, complete with gothic windows, but they were empty, and the roof had long since fallen in. There was a stone floor, but no indication that this was a grave. I looked around but didn't stick around.In spite of the turtle hunter's implied invitation, I didn't want to push my luck. And there were spirits to think about. After all this was someone's grave.

But now that I'd been there, I had to go back. It was a folly after my own heart. And now that I knew where it was, I could reduce the amount of trespassing involved: approach from the other direction, off the road, down into the gap, up the slope, and there I was.

This time it looked like someone else had been there, and from the looks of it a child: there were toys set up in a scene from a juvenile phantasmagoria: a trio of thumbkins, two of them capped with an oversized hand, arrayed before a  decapitated faun into whose hollow body had been poked a branch from some weedy bush.

Then something happened to make me seize with terror: music came from underneath the floor. That is, from the grave. It was the turtle hunter's song -- "As the story is told …" -- accompanied by the sound of a distressed chicken meant to lure trespassing coyotes.

Something told me I might not ought to stick around, so I returned home by another way.