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part 1 of the story
Wind and Rain

Carl Parsons

    1. Birth

    The child was born to them on a stormy November night, a night that had the smell of winter on its breath. Natural and healthy, twisting and twitching, with his arms going this way and that in his eagerness for life, the child first appeared like a turtle turned on its back. And nearly as silent too. At first the doctor thought something must be wrong. Perhaps the child was struggling to breathe. But no such thing. In another moment that round face looked up at him with a smile that said, I’ve come to life, come to live. Let me be!
    In this way Ashley Evans was born to his parents, John and Ella, with barely a whimper on his part, while his mother screamed and wailed as though her death were near. In fact, during the labor pains, she cried out that death had in fact fastened its grip on her, so much so that she continued to weep and wail even after the child had passed from her body into her obstetrician’s hands. “Must I die to birth it! Must I die!” she screamed over and over again while clutching the bedsheet to her face and drenching it with fearful tears, summoning all the drama of her eighteen years to this moment of crisis, despite the reassurances of the nurse beside her that all was well, normal, routine, and—ah, just look at him—now even over with. Afterwards, both doctor and nurse, while removing their surgical gloves and gowns, marveled that such a placid child had issued from such a vexing mother.
    Meanwhile, in the waiting room of the city hospital’s maternity ward, his spirit stewing in a boiling pot of his own concocting, John the father paced and fretted, not over the fate of his teenage bride or his newborn son, about whom he yet knew nothing, but at the loss of this night’s place at the poker table and any number of convivial drinks with his coworkers from the textile mill. How much might he have won tonight but for his bride’s dramatic agonies? An inveterate gambler, he always wondered about wins but never dwelled on losses.
    Why had Ella allowed the pregnancy to come to such trouble and on such a night as this? They had to leave with the evening’s winner still in doubt. Racing to the hospital in a borrowed car. Travelling through the darkness and the blowing wind and rain. For Ella’s hour of anguish, about which he had so often blustered and over which she had so often wept, for weeks on end in fact, that time, her time, had finally and decisively arrived. He left the last game holding four clubs, left before he could draw and cast another red chip into the mounting pile.
    She had allowed all this to happen just to force him to marry her—that was his true belief. He told her that over and over while thunderclouds of anger flashed about them. But he married her anyway, for she wept tears by the gallons when at first he said he wouldn’t. Then, when he said he would, she quit her job at the textile mill, a job she had never liked anyway. The fibers hurt her lungs, she claimed, just as they harmed the lungs of her sister-in-law, Rachel. By the fifth month of pregnancy, Ella portrayed herself as an invalid in constant need of care, though her doctor disagreed, encouraging her instead to exercise more. Still, she maintained that she was suffering like Rachel, who was truly afflicted with emphysema. Ella craved sympathy from Ethan, her brother, Rachel’s husband, having received none from John, her own husband. Instead, Ethan now lavished his concerns quite properly on his own disabled wife, the kind of loving attention Ella had never received from her parents and was not now receiving from John, prompting her in despair and frustration to create an elaborate melodrama from her pregnancy. Despite her doctor’s optimism, she would die giving birth; she just knew it.
    So, John paced about the waiting room, while his wife wailed down the hall, out of earshot. Occasionally he vented the wind of his worries on the receptionist. But she could tell him nothing yet about the smiling babe slumbering somewhere behind the closed doors. And so, the more John brooded, the more he paced and groused, now over the name his young wife had chosen for their child. She had in her immaturity insisted on the name, even against her husband’s will, the name Ashley. That name. It would work, in John’s opinion, only for a daughter but not at all for a son. And even for a girl it was too much for their child. It was pretentious, overdone. At least in their neighborhood it was. Yes, too much even for a girl. And, for a boy, totally impossible!
    “Oh no, it isn’t,” Ella had insisted. “Just think of Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind,” a movie she loved, therefore making her choice irrefutable. She rarely read the books that gave rise to her favorite movies, at least not the long ones, choosing instead to watch only the movies.
    “The name works for both boys and girls. Just wait, you’ll see,” she had maintained, basing her claim on her considerable trove of Hollywood fantasies.
    “It doesn’t work,” he had stormed, but thought he could use this rare concession he finally made to claim some new treasure later on.
    And so, the child named Ashley Evans was born on a stormy night amid the blustering anger and impatience of his father and the drenching tears of his mother.
    O the wind and rain!

2. Family

    In truth the child’s birth changed little for his father other than a further deepening of resentment toward his young wife for her deliberate infringements, as he saw it, on his drinking, gambling, and visitations with local prostitutes. As a corollary to his other sins, John also kept occasional company with some of the more lascivious women with whom he worked at the textile mill.
    Ethan had advised his sister about John’s vileness when she first started seeing him. “And a bad temper he has on top of all that,” Ethan warned, for he had witnessed the younger man’s misconduct many times as they worked together on the mill’s maintenance team.
    Moreover, John made no effort to conceal his sins, at least not some of them. Instead, from the first, he even enjoyed taking Ella along to witness some of his sins firsthand, more for his satisfaction of course than hers. He delighted in showing her off to his buddies from work, for she was prettier by far than their wives and girlfriends, he thought. Ella was flattered at that time by John’s praise and his grand exhibition of her around the neighborhood as though she were a movie star. Such fame, she thought, at age seventeen!The fact that she had been “showing” for several months before their marriage only added to her notoriety. But all along she was deaf to the undercurrent of danger in John’s demands on her and the liberties he took with her, even in the witness of his coworkers and friends. Disregarding her brother’s advice in this first flattering bloom of romance, she mistook John’s abuses for praise, adoration, and a type of love.
    But after her son’s birth, Ella was overwhelmed by the demands of motherhood. She now refused to be displayed anymore and stayed at home with her son. Though weeping mightily at times over the loss of her night life and neighborhood celebrity, she applied herself as diligently as she was able at the close of her teenage years to the challenges of motherhood.
    John, however, still attended to his reckless desires—playing midnight poker on kitchen tables in his coworkers’ homes, sprawling on the tawdry beds of his favorite prostitutes, drinking down clusters of brown beer bottles in the honkytonks near the mill, being drunk and delivered home by some of his friends on the streetcar that ran in front of the Evans’ house, and staggering, even crawling at times, into bed just before dawn while Ella wept through the night over his absence and profligacy and neglect of her needs.
    Before Ash’s birth (Ash was the name his parents finally settled on for daily use) and continuing until he started school, Ella would read movie star magazines and the cheap thin paperback romance novels, all of which she bought at the drug store, a short walk up Broadway Avenue from their rented home. After Ash started school, she would more often indulge her desire for romance by attending its Hollywood versions playing at the Broadway Cinema directly across the street from their house. But when she was late to return from a matinee, as sometimes happened, and failed to have supper ready for John after his day shift work, he would rage at her, threaten her, and sometimes strike her. On those occasions, the perpetual smile on Ash’s face would twist and crumple as he would cower by the sofa in the living room, his hands over his ears, while his father raged and his mother cried in the kitchen.
    At school, however, Ash always recovered his smile and placid demeanor, for he loved the classroom, loved its smells and noises and friendships. Loved the hum and warmth of its huge natural gas heater on winter days, especially after experiencing the ice that crept along the baseboards of his drafty bedroom on winter mornings when he rose to dress for school, hurriedly pulling on the patched and often tattered hand-me-downs from his cousin Eddie, Ethan and Rachel’s son. He loved the laughter of his classmates, though he himself still spoke very little and rarely joined directly in their merriment. He loved the encouragement of his teachers, too, especially Miss Corey, his fourth grade teacher.
    But most of all, he loved the visits of Mrs. Holtz, the itinerant music teacher, who visited all the town’s elementary schools once per month. Mrs. Holtz often remarked to Miss Corey what an exceptional child Ash was. How he, more than any of the other children in any of the schools she served, responded to music, music as simple as the crack of the rhythm sticks or the bang and jangle of the tambourines she brought for the children to play. How he sat entranced, as close to her as he could manage, while she played the autoharp and sang for the class. How he stared as her fingers pressing on the autoharp’s keys. “It’s as though he hears something more in these old Appalachian songs than I do myself,” she told Miss Corey. “It’s odd; it really is. Odd but fascinating too. You’d think there’s some magic, some angels maybe, just waiting in him trying to burst out with their own songs to sing. I wonder what will become of him and if he’ll be able to keep that smile he has now. I wonder, too, if the boy will ever have much to say!”
    Despite his silences, for Ash school was better than home, much better.
    O the dreadful wind and rain!

3. Guitar

    One September morning after Ash had started sixth grade, he rose from bed, dressed himself, and crept into the living room before his parents were stirring. He often did this on Saturdays to watch the children’s programs on their small black and white TV. But this day, on the family’s shabby green sofa sat a surprise—a guitar case. It was only a pasteboard case, patched here and there with silver duct tape, but inside, when Ash with irrepressible curiosity opened the case, was a real guitar. An ivory flat pick was stuck between the bass strings just below the first fret. He couldn’t resist. Quickly forgetting about the children’s programs, he carried the guitar into his bedroom and shut the door.
    He had seen his uncle Ethan and his cousin Eddie play guitars, banjos, and even dobroes many times. Uncle Ethan could also play mandolin. Moreover, both he and his son played their instruments quite well. Eddie, who was now fourteen, had recently joined his father’s band of musicians called Ethan’s Bluegrass Gang. Eddie was just an extra guitar for now, mostly playing rhythm for the others, or tootling on the penny whistle for the Celtic folk songs they also performed. But still he was there in their performances at the Broadway Cinema on Saturday nights and sometimes again on Sunday mornings, playing gospel songs for the Southside Evangelical Temple. Most of these performances were even broadcast on the local radio station, WSPR, the studio of which flanked the east side of the theater while a small diner favored by most in the neighborhood stood to its west.
    As he held the guitar Ash was thinking of Mrs. Holtz’s fingers pressing on the autoharp’s keys while her right hand stroked a thumb pick across its strings. Then he began to pick the guitar strings, trying to find notes he recognized by clamping down on the different strings between the frets, just as he had seen his uncle Ethan do. Plucking softly, listening for a note he recognized, all the while afraid that awakening his parents might somehow make the guitar disappear. He eventually assembled a few notes into a melody—“Yes, Jesus Loves Me.” He repeated it again and then again until he could press and pick the right strings at the right time. Then he worked on improving the tempo, but as he did, his playing became louder and louder.
    “What the hell’s that noise?” he heard his father ask from the next room, the syllables slurred and spoken as though he were emerging from drowning waters. Still, Ash played on.
    “I think it’s Ash with that guitar you brought home,” Ash could hear his mother reply and stir in the bed, probably rising now, as Ash played “the Bible tells me so.”
    “Guitar! What damn guitar’s that?” Now his father was more alert, his enunciation more distinct. “When the hell did I ever have a guitar?”
    “Don’t you even remember, for goodness’ sake?” Ella was incredulous. “The guitar you brought home just a little while ago. I thought you won it for Ash, playing cards. That’s what you said when you flopped down beside me. I thought you got it for him. Or were you just saying that to make me feel better about your coming home so late again?”
    “Well, maybe I did win it. Yes, believe I did but don’t remember for sure. Probably belonged to Nick Harris. We were playing stud poker at his house. He ran out of money; I remember that much. Probably put up his boy’s guitar for collateral. I’ll bet that’s what he did and then lost it to me. That’s it! Didn’t want his boy to have it to begin with. The damn thing’s been in every pawn shop in town at some time or other. Heard him say so when he first got it for his kid. Don’t think it’ll keep a tune anymore. Says his boy’s always complained about that. Not much good, I expect, else Nick wouldn’t have parted with it so easy. Just can’t remember carrying the damn thing home.”
    “Well, you did, and now it’s your son’s. And just listen to him! He can already play a little tune on it.”
    O the wind and rain.

4. Lessons

    It only made sense for Ash to learn from Uncle Ethan, who was, after all, a master of stringed instruments. And he had been such a good teacher for Eddie. Besides, Ash asked his uncle to teach him with such earnestness. Ethan thought about his nephew’s request for a day or so before agreeing to it. Teaching his own son had been no problem; Eddie just wanted to follow his father’s lead. But Ash wanted to learn to play for the music’s own sake, to please no one but the spirit of the music itself; that much was clear from his pleading. Ethan could hear the desire in Ash’s voice but could also see it in his face. So, on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, Ash went to the Vaughans’ for guitar lessons.
    Those lessons meant a new life for Ash. The magic Mrs. Holtz had sensed in him now found an outlet; the angels she imagined stirred, unfolding their virginal wings inside him with a rustle of sweet notes. His uncle taught him scales, chord progressions, arpeggios, fingering techniques, both flat and cross picking, and much more—mostly in bluegrass style but also in the more melodic scales of the Appalachian folk songs. Ash would play a stanza or even a complete song over and over, trying to increase the tempo, one measure at a time, until his speed playing on the guitar rivaled his uncle’s on the short necked mandolin. He practiced what he learned day in and day out until his fingertips felt as though the thin tenor strings would slice right through them.
    “Let me see those fingers,” his uncle would say when he’d notice Ash wince. “Now you got to rest a few days to let them heal, else you’ll have more trouble and that’ll slow you down. And get some salve on those fingertips, else you’ll make the strings squeak. You want to build calluses all right but do it gradually.” And so, Ash would rest his hands and fingers and rub them with salve and oil, though personally he liked the sound of the strings squeaking. But just as soon as his fingers began to feel the least bit better, he’d return to playing, shorter but more frequent practice sessions. Before long he knew ten songs perfectly, then ten more and learned them much quicker than Ethan ever thought possible.
    He also learned to tune his guitar, for, as his father had been told, it was unable to hold tune for more than ten minutes of playing time before the worn tuning keys would begin to slip and allow the strings to slacken.
    “You’re going to need another guitar, Ash,” his uncle told him. “Might as well face up to it. You can’t stop a performance every few minutes and go offstage to retune your instrument. Might as well start saving for it.”
    Immediately Ash got a job washing dishes at the diner across the street. Every weekend he would plunge his hands into the hot soapy water, soothing his fingertips and earning his own money. When at last he’d saved thirty dollars, he boarded the streetcar for town and returned a few hours later with his nearly new acoustic guitar. After that, nothing could stop him. Ethan marveled at his nephew’s progress. Skills that others might require years to acquire, Ash mastered in a few weeks through his diligence. When he played the fast tempos so often required in bluegrass, he made his guitar sound like the galloping of wild horses, but in the slow and mournful folk songs, he could also make it sound like a harp plucked by the fingers of one of his angels.
    O the dreadful wind and rain.

5. Singing

    Shortly after his guitar purchase, Ash was able to give up dishwashing to play backup guitar for Ethan’s Bluegrass Gang, replacing his cousin Eddie, who now played lead guitar and sang a bit. In his turn, Eddie was replacing a musician who had left the band to find a job out of state since the textile mill was now laying off workers. The weekend performances didn’t pay much for any of them, just a few dollars for sessions played at the Broadway Cinema on Friday and Saturday nights and experience only on Sunday mornings for playing gospel songs during the Southside Evangelical Temple’s services, which also met inside the cinema. Uncle Ethan insisted on donating those performances as a Christian obligation; the other musicians sometimes grumbled but agreed, more or less. As for Ash, the experience of being on stage in front of a real audience, whether clappers or congregants, was compensation enough for him.
    After a few months of this routine, Ethan had a new suggestion for Ash. “To be a really successful bluegrass artist, you have to learn to sing, not just play the music. I know you don’t even like to talk that much, but you have to learn to sing. You’ve got a good clear voice when you bother to use it. Right now, you let your fingers fly up and down the fretboard to do your talking for you.”
    “That’s because I feel good with the guitar in my hands. Not sure how I feel about singing.”
    “But the time’s come for you to learn. People forget musicians, you know. Doesn’t matter how good they are. But just let a man or woman sing to them, and they’ll remember that and remember it a long while, maybe forever. It becomes personal for them. Even if the musician standing right next to the singer plays his instrument ten times better than the singer plays his, people will remember the one who sang to them. So, sing, Ash. You’ve got to learn to sing.”
    “But how should I sing, Uncle Ethan? What’s the right way to sing bluegrass, just tell me that. Can’t be the same as the singing we do in the school choir, at least not as far as I can tell.”
    “No, it’s sure not choir music, except maybe when we all crowd around the microphone for the harmony parts of the gospel songs. Just think of it this way. Imagine a train. The whole bluegrass band is like a train. The banjo is the big wheels of the locomotive, grinding on the rails, driving through the coal country, up the mountains and down again, or through the river valleys and by the factories and our little West Virginia hamlets with just a few houses scattered along the tracks. Just like the trains you hear day and night right here, chuffing along our little river to service the factories on this side of town or up and down the banks of the Ohio carrying the town’s products to market. That twanging banjo is the constant rhythm of the locomotive’s wheels grinding on the rails. And the bass is the car wheels thumping over the gaps in the rails, keeping tempo for the trip through the song. The fiddle is the rattle of the railcars, their jittering as they bump along, keening over life’s woes, you could say. And finally, the mandolin and the guitar, your guitar included now—they’re the landscape rushing by with the towns and villages and people in them. People with their stories, whether happy or sad, all gathered up and mixed together in the songs we sing—the gospel hopes and the lost loves, the dreary and dangerous jobs, the marriages gone wrong and the lives cut short. They’re all of them in our songs, both the new ones and the old ones. But especially in those old ones, I’d say, brought to Appalachia from across the sea by our ancestors.” Then, seeing a flash of recognition in Ash’s eyes, Ethan asked, “Did you know that already?”
    “Yes, sure did. Mrs. Holtz at grade school told us all about that, including the keening you mentioned. It’s our heritage, she said. Then she’d sing one of those old songs for us. But what about the singer? How does the singer fit into your train picture?”
    “The singer is the train whistle blowing long, long, long.” Uncle Ethan moved his hands farther and farther apart in front of his chest as he spoke. “Blowing in the night and the dark days. Putting words and feelings into the stories along with the voices from the mandolin and guitar. Saying, ‘Look out, people. The train’s comin.’ Clear the tracks! The train’s comin,’ bringing you another story. And after it does, nothing’s going to be the same!’ So make your voice that long drawn out mournful sound, Ash. Make it as sad as you can, just like the train’s whistle blowing in the middle of the night, up and down these valleys and echoing off these hills. All lonesome and sad, both proud and painful. These people around here know that sound well, trust me they do. And they listen to what it says, and they honor the ones who sing it to them. That’s why you have to learn to sing. Haven’t you heard those sounds yourself, Ash? Don’t you feel them inside you sometimes?”
    “Yes, reckon I do. Most nights, lying in my bedroom, I can hear them as the trains go up and down along the river. Could even hear those sounds just now as you were talking about them. But never thought about singing them myself.”
    “That’s okay. But try it now, try out one of the old songs, since you like those so much. Got to learn to sing them as well as play them.” Ethan flipped through a stack of sheet music on his music stand. “Here’s one, not an easy one either, ‘O the Wind and Rain.’ Your being able to read music already puts you miles ahead of the rest of us in learning. I’ve struggled to teach myself just enough to keep us all on the same page. Now here, try this one.”
    Ethan handed Ash the sheet music. Ash looked it over briefly, then sang the song accurately but without much feeling while playing accompaniment on his guitar. With his voice being so light at first, the words all but blew away as soon as they left his mouth.
    “No, no!” His uncle stopped him after the first verse. “Three things to remember, Ash—no, maybe four. One, keep the chords and accompaniment part you play simple when you’re doing the singing. Leave most of the accompaniment to the others in the band. Two, your voice needs to sound well above the playing. It can’t be so light, else the people in the back rows won’t hear you at all. Three, don’t be looking at the fretboard or the strings. By now you already know where the chords are, so no need to look for them. Look at the audience instead. And four, the most important thing, only think about the song—what it says, the story it tells, and the feelings the story makes in you. Then you have to put those feelings into your throat and sing them out while you look directly at the people who’ve come to hear you and not at your guitar. You can look at that when you play breaks in between the verses but not when you’re singing.
    “Now, try it again. Just pretend I’m some big audience come to hear you, then sing this sad old song to them. Tell them how this one gal, gone mad with jealousy, drowns her little sister all because the miller’s son loves the younger one and not her. Sing it again, Ash, and then you can finish it off with a break if you like.”

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