In the first installment of
this series of sketches in this space provided courtesy of my old yellow brick
road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin,
who seems to think I still had a few things to say about this wicked old world,
I mentioned, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to
download into my iPod that I came across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not
listened to or thought about that song
for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I
did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay
Eye (California East Bay, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam
veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going
back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or
two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramp camps located along the
abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of
California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”
The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me
that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the
treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans
Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out
about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they
could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for
the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during
the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been
involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI
coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down near Fort Dix in New
Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation
who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.
After making connections with
some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where
to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in
the Eye, and put the rest in my
helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the
old Eye archives, I went up into my
attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no
newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes,
specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them
into shape.
The ground rules of those
long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give
his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to hear, and I would write it up
without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in
this series, have reconstructed this story as best I can although at this far
remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said.
Not every guy I interviewed,
came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of
the air from was from hunger. Most were, yes, in one way or
another but some, and the one I am recalling in this sketch from 1981 fits this
description, had no real desire to advertise their own hunger but just wanted
to get something off their chest about some lost buddy, or some event they had witnessed. I have presented
enough of these sketches both back in the day and here to not make a
generalization about what a guy might be hiding in the deep recesses of his
mind. Some wanted to give a blow by blow description of every firefight (and
every hut torched) they were involved in, others wanted to blank out ‘Nam
completely and talk of before or after times, as is the case here with the late
Caleb Marcus Jackson, who wanted to talk about home, the hills and hollows of Appalachia.
I like to finish up these introductions by placing these sketches under a
particular sign; no question Caleb Marcus Jackson’s sign was that of the “hills
and hollows of home.
The late Caleb Marcus Jackson, Jr. (always called Calvin Marcus to distinguish him from his father, Caleb Marcus Jackson, Sr. by Mother Jackson and anyone else who was unsure of themselves when calling out for a Jackson, father or son) knew how to tell a story, knew the rhythm, knew how to get emotionally involved with whatever subject he was going on about, and best of all he knew how to wrap it up with a snappy punch line or some ponderous moral. Yah, Caleb Marcus, could tell a story, tell them in that southeast Kentucky mountain hills and hollows drawl that was not as harsh as deep south planation two hundred years at the bourbon barrel, handkerchief in hand mopping off the midday (hell midnight too) sweat in high season summer, rousting n----rs out of their pre-dawn cabins to go to the fields and cut that damn white ball boll cotton in order to keep that bourbon barrel well-filled. Nor was that Caleb Marcus drawl so pale, so say Maryland tidewaters pale, that those from further south thought the speaker was trying to pass, pass for a yankee. So put the drawl, the two hundred years secluded drawl perfected by those who did not go further west than Kentuck when the soil finally ran out back east or decided to go west but wound up in the hills and hollows and for lack of anything better to do settled in, poor boy settled in, put in a thousand years of grit, put in some detail and you had a classic storyteller, a plebeian master at work.
I had first run into Caleb when, as I mentioned above , I was doing a series of articles entitled Brothers Under The Bridge for the now long defunct East Bay Eye (California) on the fate (and/or plight) of some Vietnam veterans I had run into out under the bridges, in the ravines, along the railroads tracks and other “jungle’ spots dotting the Southern California landscape who told me about Caleb, and his homey Kentuck hills and hollows stories that kept many a camp fire refugee enthralled about a place that took on almost mythic proportions over time. I sat in one night, one 1979 cold, California cold, fall night after I caught up with him down in Westminster south of Los Angeles where he had been working the fields trying to earn some dough to get back home. He had, after a couple of years under urban bridges, realized that if he was to survive he had to get back to his hills and hollows roots. That night he told a thoughtful humorous story about a Yankee interloper and his flat-lands girlfriend who attended a ritualistic Saturday night barn dance down in his hometown Prestonsburg, Kentucky and who morphed (my word) into the second coming of Daniel Boone, or something. On the basis of that story which held me in its thrall and a couple of others that he mentioned as we became more acquainted I decided that this guy had enough talent to warrant trying to get him published if only in some off-beat folkloric journal. He left me an address back home to get in touch with him and we left it at that.
Caleb Marcus had one problem though, or maybe two problems but they kind of went together. A problem for me anyway when I decided a couple of years later (don’t ask me to explain the delay because that was part of my story at the time, not Caleb’s) that I would try to get some of his stuff printed after I had tracked him down in Prestonsburg, Kentucky. First, he couldn’t read, read so well anyway (although U.S. Army good enough apparently), and what he could read was done in such a painfully halting fashion that it was better not to put him, or me, in that quandary. Second, Calvin Mark could not write, write much more than his name. When I asked him why he never learned those two skills he said, “there weren’t no call for learning them,” and so he didn’t.
Me,
well, I just kept up with his stories as best I could, writing down little
notes, or keeping them in my head for sunnier times when they could be expanded
into something bigger, but now, now that he is gone, a sketch will have to do-a
sketch from Caleb Marcus about what it was like on Saturday night down in the
hills and hollows, or at least one late 1960s Saturday night, that one night I
had heard about when I sat in at the campfire down in Westminster. A story that
he had heard a few years after it occurred, heard after he had gotten back to
the “real” world (from Vietnam) down in the hills and hollows, down where the
mountain winds blow through and create a song of their own. A story of a night
when fearing some Sunday morning preacher man retribution, but willing to risk
it, the god-fearing brethren let loose, let the liquor (corn of course where
would one get city Johnny Walker some color liquor down in the rutted ravens,
or have cash money for such city goods) flow, got out the fiddles, banjos,
guitars, mandolins, bells, washboards and whatever else would make noise and
headed for Farmer Johnson’s old unused broke down red barn (unused except for
Saturday night dances and drinking bouts, liquor courtesy of Moonshine Prescott
whose moniker speaks for itself and who also acted as dance sponsor, as long as
anybody around the hollows could remember, and they are a long-memoried
people).
This
one night, the night Caleb Marcus spoke of, the Prestonsburg Sheiks (some
of whom would later go on to form the
mountain music-famous Kentucky Sheiks
and receive a record contract from Decal Records, after they had been heard
over in Hazard by one of their agents who had been sent out to scour the
countryside, sour those damn hills and hollows, looking for talent for their
mountain music division in the wake of the success of the Carter Family
revival) were brought in to play since the banjo player was engaged to Miss
Catherine Prescott, one of Moonshine Prescott’s daughters.
In any case bringing in this
locally famous talent in the music-starved hills and hollows assured a great
turn-out. And plenty of business for Moonshine Prescott (plenty of corn liquor
business if you are clueless), plenty of loose talk, plenty of flirting (and
more) and plenty of heaven- sent music.
Listen to the details of
Caleb’s reaction, of Caleb’s pride in his “country” (as we discussed it in 1981 Prestonsburg from
my notes, spruced up a little by me in the language department but pure Caleb
Marcus in the telling) as he campfire told
that story about a guy, a yankee guy, a guy named Frank (I think that
was the name Caleb mentioned although my notes have a couple of names, but the
important thing was this guy was strictly a yankee), who found himself at that
dance that night with a gal, a flat-lands Indiana gal named Angelica, who had
kin in area and who had come through Prestonsburg just in time to learn about
the magic of the mountains down Caleb Marcus’s way. Caleb had picked this Frank
up hitchhiking outside of Lexington
(Kentucky, okay) while he was transporting whatever he transported on his job
for Giant Trucking and was heading back to home
base Prestonsburg. This was maybe four or five years after the incidents
described in the barn dance story and a couple of years before the break-down
that caused Caleb Marcus to flee west (only to flee back at the beck and call
of the mountain siren). They got to talking, Frank mainly, talking about why he
wanted to get back to southeastern Kentucky and so to while away the time this Frank
told Caleb Marcus why he was heading that way.
It seems that Frank and
Angelica had started out in Steubenville up the Ohio River in the summer of
1969 where Angelica had been serving them off the arm at some backwater
truck-stop diner when Frank drifted in after being let off by a truck driver
who had picked him up on the hitchhike road in Boston. This was just supposed
to be a way-station stop for Frank who was heading west to California, in
search of whatever guys were searching for in the late 1960s. They hit it off
right away, and in 1960s fashion, Angelica ditched her job and joined Frank on
the road west. This story is really about a detour as will be explained because
they headed south first before moving west. Calvin Mark said some other stuff I
forgot before this part but I have lost the notes so let’s pick it up where
Caleb has this Frank explaining how they wound up at that red barn:
“In the few weeks that Angelica had been working long hours at the diner trying to help make a stake to head west (I was washing dishes in the diner and doing odd jobs as a gas jockey as well) she served many of the truckers whose rigs were idling in the truck stop rest area we were cruising for rides [on the first day they finally decided to start heading west]. So, naturally, she tried to find out where some of those truckers that she knew were heading. This day, they were heading mainly east, or anyway not west. Finally, she ran into one burly teamster, Eddie, who was heading down Route 7 along the Ohio River to catch Interstate 64 further down river and then across through to Lexington, Kentucky. Angelica was thrilled because, as it turned out, she had kin [her term, okay], a cousin or something, down in Prestonsburg, Kentucky whom she hadn’t seen in a while and where we could stay for a few days and take in the mountain air (her idea of rest, mine was strictly ocean breezes, thank you)."
[Caleb Marcus: Frank did not know that I was from Prestonsburg although he knew from my drawl that I was from somewhere around there and after he kept pestering through the ride about where I was from I just told him down the road in Harlan. See, I wasn’t sure on this Frank, wasn’t sure at all even though I had heard his whole story during the several hours we spent together driving from Lexington. I had picked up plenty of hitch-hikers for company so it wasn’t that, nor was it his long hair, long beard and army jacket get-up that put me off. Hell the guy was about half my size so I would have broken him in two if he had tried anything like I did one time when a half- drunk cowboy (a real cowboy too from Laredo, or someplace like that) tried some funny business and I busted his nose as a courtesy). It was just some of the story didn’t add up. Like this gal’s kin, the names didn’t sound right since I knew all the folks in the area from my own times at those Saturday night dances. Funny I didn’t find out until later, just before I headed to Los Angeles, that the couple they were visiting whom I didn’t know, Annadeene and Fred, had moved into the area (and are still there) while I was in ‘Nam and when I got back I didn’t care to go to Saturday night dances, or any place that I would have run into them once I started hauling goods for Mister Prescott at Giant Trucking.
Funny too how I reacted when Frank spoke of Angelica’s waitressing at that diner brought back a flood of memories from when my high school sweetheart, Sally Fox, used to work at Millie’s Café right in downtown Prestonsburg, what did Frank call it, oh yah, serving them off the arm, and I would pick her up about eight or nine on Saturday night as the café closed up so we could go over to Farmer Johnson’s red barn and do some two-stepping. (And imbibe some of Moonshine Prescott’s golden liquor by the jar.) Sally said she’d wait for me until I got back from ‘Nam, and she did, except when I got back, got back kind of broke up in my head more than anything , I told her to move on, and she finally did, she did with one of Moonshine’s boys. No regrets, well, maybe just small ones.]
"I tried, tried desperately, without being obnoxious about it, to tell her that heading south was not going to get us to the west very easily. She would have none of it, and she rightly said, that we were in no rush and what was wrong with a little side trip to Kentucky anyway. Well, I suppose in the college human nature course, Spat-ology 101, if there was such a course, and they taught it, I should have had enough sense to throw in the towel. After all this was Angelica’s first, now seriously, whimsical venture out on the road. And I did, in the end, throw in the towel, except not for the reason that you think."
[Caleb Marcus: Damn I never knew when to throw in the towel with a woman from Sally Fox on, except when it didn’t count or mean much.]
"What Angelica didn’t know until later was that I was deathly afraid of going to Kentucky. See, I had set myself up to the world as, and was in fact in my head, a Yankee, an Oceanside Yankee, if you like. I was born in Massachusetts and have the papers to prove it, but on those papers there is an important fact included. My father’s place of birth was Hazard, Kentucky probably not more than fifty to one hundred miles away from Prestonsburg. He was born down in the hills and hollows of mining country, coal mining country, made famous in song and legend. And also made infamous (to me) by Michael Harrington’s Other America which described in detail the plight of Appalachian whites, my father’s people. And also, as a result of the publicity about the situation down there, the subject in my early 1960s high school of a clothing drive to help them out. My father had left the mines when World War II started, enlisted in the Marines, saw his fair share of battles in the Pacific, got stationed before discharge at a Naval Depot in Massachusetts and never looked back. And see I never wanted him to look back. Like I said I threw in the towel, but I was not happy about it. Not happy at all."
[Caleb Marcus: Jesus I remember that early 1960s time when every yankee and his brother, sisters too, came down to see if we needed anything. My pa and ma said, yes, we needed something, to be left alone. Mountain people know how to talk sense sometimes. Later in L.A. I always appreciated it when the Sallies (Salvation Army) put me up or gave me a meal but I sure felt strange doing it. Ma and Pa would have had a fit if they had been alive and knew I was taking charity. Pa would have whipped me down to size for sure as big as I am.]
"Actually the ride down Route 7 was pretty uneventful and, for somebody who did not feel comfortable looking at trees and mountains, some of the scenery was pretty breath-taking. That is until we started getting maybe twenty miles from Prestonsburg and the air changed, the scenery changed, and the feel of the social milieu changed. See we were getting in the edges of coal country, not the serious “Bloody Harlan” stuff of legend but the older, scrap heap part that had been worked over, and “worked out” long along. The coal bosses had taken the earth’s assets and left the remnants behind to foul the air and foul the place."
[Caleb Marcus: See what Frank didn’t see was the what we saw which was just trying to make ends meet and failing, failing nine times out of ten to get that rock up the mountain. It was that rock, that rock falling back on me, really back on my spirit that made me go out to Los Angeles once I heard from Lonesome Bob, my old platoon sergeant, that some guys, some guys that were having a hard time with the VA, with the wife, with the family, with, just call it the “real” world like we did in ’Nam, and were setting up camps all along southern California to get a breath of fresh air, and maybe a new start. After I let Sally go, what with my parents dead and gone, there was nothing holding me to these damn hills and hollas. So I thought. ]
"But, mostly, and here is where I finally understood why my father took his chances in World War II and also why he never looked back, shacks. Nothing but haphazardly placed unpainted shacks, hard-scrabble patched roofs just barely covering them. With out-houses, out-houses can you believe that in America. And plenty of kids hanging out in the decidedly non-manicured front yards waiting… well, just waiting. All that I can say about my feelings at the time was that I would be more than willing to crawl on all fours to get back to my crummy old growing up homestead rather than fight the dread of this place."
[Caleb Marcus: I ain’t saying that there were mansions around these parts then, except maybe some of Mister Peabody’s people a couple of valleys over, but not all the houses looked like something from some Okie place like the Joads had when I saw that Grapes Of Wrath movie one time, the one with Henry Fonda in it as Tom Joad. With Sally Fox, naturally, since the movies at the Capitol movie house were one of the few places in this town that young people, young and sex hungry young people, could let off a little steam without Ma or Pa, or worse, the preacher man, the hell-fired Baptist preacher man in this town then, if he wasn’t on circuit, getting all riled up about sin, and brimstone and damnation). We just thought we had kin elsewhere is all, poor kin unlike us that had the land free and clear with no bank to come in and say we had to leave. Maybe too down here in the hollows we didn’t have that much to compare with so unlike Frank we weren’t never bothered by it, it was our homes, and that was that.]
"Fortunately Angelica’s kin (second cousin), Annadeene, husband, both about twenty, and two kids , lived further down the road, out of town, in a trailer camp which the husband, Fred, had expanded so that it had the feel of a small country house. Most importantly it had indoor plumbing and a spare room where Angelica and I could sleep and put our stuff. Fred, as I recall, was something of a skilled mechanic (coal equipment mechanic) who worked for a firm that was indirectly connected to the Eastern Kentucky coal mines."
[Caleb Marcus: I tried, before I got into the army in 1966, to get a job as a mechanic’s apprentice at Eastern Mining but because, and I ain’t ashamed to say it as you know, I couldn’t read so good they only wanted me for heavy mine work and I said no way, not with farm work still available and not, as it turned out, with me ready, willing and able to go and fight the gooks, Charlie, you know what I mean, those Vietnamese peasants that didn’t seem to give a damn about life, just as long as they could farm their little rice paddles. Hell, it took a long time, two rounds in the VA hospital over in Wheeling all broken up mentally and physically after I came back , a few years on the bum in L.A., and some hard times here in paradise before I realized they were just defending theirs like I would defend ours over here. No regrets though, or maybe just a couple.]
"This Prestonsburg was nothing but one of a thousand such towns that I have passed through. A main street with a few essential stores, some boarded up retail space and then you are out of town. Moreover, Route 7 as it turned into Route 23 heading into Prestonsburg and then further down turned into nothing but an old country, pass at your own risk, country road about where Angelica’s cousin lived. What I am trying to get at though is that although these people were in the 20th century they were somewhat behind the curve. This is, as it probably was in my father’s time, patriotic country, country where you did your military service came home, worked, if you could find it, got married and raised a family. Just in tougher circumstances than elsewhere."
[Caleb Marcus chuckled over that one, especially since this Frank was clueless that he had been born and raised right in the middle of this coal slag heap. He laughed too when he related that when he went north for basic military training in 1966 and the bus stopped at a highway rest stop that stop was bigger than the whole of downtown Prestonsburg then, and the bigger “town” he had seen in his life. Biggest until, on a weekend pass, he and a couple of Kentuck companions went to New York City and flipped out, flipped out at the lights and everything else on 42nd Street. Later, when he had passed through New York again, Chicago, Denver, and L.A. that stardust had been very much removed from his eyes.]
"I understood that part. What I did not understand then, and am still somewhat confused about, is the insularity of the place. The wariness, serious wariness, of strangers even of strangers brought to the hills and hollows by kin. I was not well received at least first, and I still am not quite sure if I ever was, by Angelica’s kin and I suppose if I thought about it while they had heard of “hippies” (every male with beard, long hair, and jeans was suspected of belonging to that category) Prestonsburg was more like something from Merle Haggard’s Okie From Muskogee lyrics than Haight-Ashbury. Angelica kept saying that I would grow on them (like I did on her) but I knew, knew down deep that we had best get out of there. I kept pressing the issue but she refused to listen to any thoughts of our leaving until after Saturday night’s barn dance. After all Fred and Annadeene had “‘specially invited us to go with them,” she said. We could leave Sunday morning but not before. Christ, a hillbilly hoe-down."
[Another Caleb chuckle, and a -"this yankee kid really had his say and some stuff to get off his chest that day he rode with me."]
"I would have felt no compulsion to go into anything but superficial detail about this barn dance but something happened requiring more detail. Otherwise this scene lacks completeness. I will say that I have a very clear picture of Angelica being fetching for this dance. All her feminine wiles got a workout that night. What I can’t remember is what she wore or how she wore her hair (up, I think) but the effect on me (and the other guys) was calculated to make me glad, glad as hell, that we stayed for this thing. What I can remember vividly though is that this barn dance actually took place in a barn, just a plain old ordinary barn that had been used in this area for years (according to the oldsters since back in the 1920s) [Caleb-1905] for the periodic dances that filled up the year and broke the monotony of the mountain existence. The old faded red-painted barn, sturdily build to withstand the mountain winds and containing a stage for such occasions was something out of a movie, some movie that you have seen, so you have some idea of what it was like even if you have never been within a hundred miles of a barn."
[Caleb Marcus; Folks around here still go to that old barn, old Farmer Johnson’s red barn every few Saturday nights a year and probably will do so for eternity. Like I said before Sally and I used to go, her all dolled up like Frank said his Angelica was, in some mother home-made dress when she was younger and then when she started working at Millie’s Café store-bought and all the guys, including me, Sally hungry, Sally smelling of fresh soap, and hair done up, and ribbons, and…, let’s not keep talking about it let’s just say I was proud, hillbilly hills proud, to be with her. Like I said too after I got back to the “real” world and had my spells I didn’t want to go, especially after I let her go, what with her and Moonshine’s boy, Jack Prescott, going to be there. Let’s kind of stay off that subject, okay.]
"Moreover the locals had gone to some effort to decorate the place, provide plenty of refreshments and use some lighting to good effect. What was missing was any booze. This was a “dry” county then (and maybe still is) but not to worry wink, wink there was plenty of “white lightning” around out in the makeshift dirt parking lot where clusters of good old boys hovered around certain cars whose owners had all you needed (and who all worked for Moonshine Prescott, the guy who was sponsoring the dance and the king pin of the local corn liquor industry). Just bring your own fixings. After we had checked out the arrangements in the barn and Annadeene had introduced us to her neighbors Fred tapped me on the shoulder and “hipped” me to the liquor scene. We went outside. Fred talked quietly to one of the busy car owners and then produced a small jar for my inspection. “Hey, wait,” he said “you have to cut that stuff a little with some water if you are not used to it.” I took my jar, added some water, and took a swig. Jesus Christ, I almost fell down the stuff was so powerful."
[Caleb: Damn right. As my Pa used to say, and his father before him, Moonshine’s golden liquor would put hair on your chest. Of course once I first left here and had store-bought liquor up in New York I never got that same punch from whisky and I drank a Ohio River of the stuff before I started to sober up a little. By the way if you want to try a sample Moonshine Prescott’s boy, not Jack, Jimmy, yah, the one who was the big-time stock- car driver up in North Carolina before he took a big crash and burn and had to quit, runs the family business now. The revenue boys don’t even bother going after him since that soup-ed up Chevy of his out in the real hollows and ravines with him at the wheel can outrun them before they even get out of town. Just let me know and I will make the connections.]
"Look, I was used to drinking whiskey straight up, or I thought I drank whiskey straight up but after one swig, one swig, my friend, I confess I was a mere teetotaler. Several minutes later we went back inside and I nursed, literally nursed, that jar for the rest of the night. But you know I got “high” off it and was in good spirits. So good that I started dancing with Angelica once the coterie of banjo players, fiddlers, guitarists and mandolin players got finished warming up, a group calling itself the Prestonsburg Sheiks. I am not much of a dancer under the best of circumstances but, according to her, I did okay that night."
[Caleb Marcus: I had plenty of sympathy for Frank when he said that. I was never much of dancer either without a jar of something to fortify me. Sally was always after me to let her show me and practice some but I said I didn’t want to be like some fag schoolboy having to have her show me. Sometimes, I would just “show her off” and let a guy like Jack Prescott who I was friendly with then dance with her. Of course when I got back to the ‘real” world with that gimpy leg I wasn’t interested in dancing with Sally or anybody else no matter how many jars of Moonshine’s golden liquor I had to fortify me.]
"Hey, you’d expect that the music was something out of the Grand Ole Opry, some Hee-Haw hoe-down stuff, some Arkansas Jamboree hokum, right? Forget that. See back in the mountains they did not have access to much television or sheet music or other such refinements. What they played they learned from mama and papa, or some uncle who got it from god knows where. It’s all passed down from something like time immemorial and then traced back to the old county, the British Isles mainly. Oh sure there was a “square” hoe-down thing or two but what I heard that night was something out of the mountain night high-powered eerie winds as they rolled down the hills and hollows (hollas, if you are from there). Something that spoke of hard traveling first from the old country when your luck ran out there, then from the east coast of America when that got too crowded and you just sat down when you hit those grey-blue mountains, or maybe, although I never asked (and under the circumstances would not have dared to ask) formed their version of the great American West night, and this was as far as they got, or cared to go."
[Caleb Marcus: Yah, that music was good, and with a little jar, and Sally, well, I guess it’s alright now to say it, after one of those dances Sally and I went out back and did our thing for the first time. Out back when the moon was out and the trees were rustling to hide our love noises, and our giggles. But let’s move on, okay.]
"Some of this music I knew from my folk experiences in Boston and Cambridge when everybody, including me, was looking for the roots of folk music. Certainly I knew Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies when the band played it instrumentally. That was one of the first songs, done by gravelly-voiced Dave Van Ronk, I heard on the folk radio station that I listened to. But, see, back in those early days that stuff, for the most part, was too, well you know, too my father’s music for me to take seriously. Bob Dylan was easier to listen to for a message that “spoke” to me. But this night I thrilled to hear real pros going one-on-one to out-fiddle, out-banjo, out-mandolin, out, out-any instrument each other in some mad dash to appease the mountain nymphs, or whatever or whoever was being evoked to keep civilization away from the purity of the music. That night was as close as I got to my roots, and feeling good about those roots, and also as close as I got to Angelica."
[Caleb Marcus: Funny, and I thought it was funny later too, Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies, was my mother’s favorite song that she sung some version of from the Carter Family heard on the radio, Frank said there were many variations that he knew from some Child’s Ballad book, and was my favorite too.]
"About 12:30 or one o’clock the dance broke up, although as we headed down the rutted, jagged street we could still hear banjos and fiddles flailing away to see who really was “king of the hill.” Angelica said she was glad that we stayed, and I agreed. She also said that, yes, I was right; it was time to head west. She said it in such a way that I felt that she could have been some old time pioneer woman who once she recognized that the land was exhausted knew that the family had to pull up stakes and push on. It was just a matter of putting the bundles together and saying goodbye to the neighbors left behind. Needless to say old resourceful road companion Angelica, sweet, fetching Angelica put that fetchiness to good use and had us lined up for a ride from another Eddie truck driver who, if he was sober enough, was heading out with a load at 6:00 AM to Winchester just outside Lexington from where we could make better connections west. 6:00 AM, are you kidding? I was still wearing about eight pound of that white lightning, or whatever it was. Angelica merely pointed out in her winsome, fetching way that nobody forced me to drink that rotgut (her word) liquor when softer refreshments had been available inside. Touché, 6:00 AM it is."
[Caleb Marcus; I remember Eddie, a good guy if it was the same one, they used to call him Colonel Eddie because like a lot of Kentuck guys for about two bucks you could get a genuine certificate that you were a Kentucky Colonel even if you hadn’t been within, like Eddie, a thousand miles of any war, except maybe the battle of the bottle, whisky bottle most probably.]
"Dog tired, smelling of a distillery, or some old-time hardware store (where the white lightning ingredients probably came from) Angelica and I laid our heads down to get a few hours sleep. Gently she nuzzled up to my side (how she did it through the alcoholic haze I do not know) and gave every indication that she wanted to make love. Now we were right next door to the two unnamed [lost note] sleeping children, sleeping the sleep of the just, and as she got more aggressive we have to be, or we think we have to be, more quiet. No making the earth under the Steubenville truck stop motel cabin shake [a reference to the first night they made love] shake that night. And, as we talked about it on the road later, that was not what was in her mind. She just wanted to show, in a very simple way, that she appreciated that I had stayed, that I had been wise enough to figure out how long we should stay, and that, drunk or sober, I would take her feelings into account. Not a bad night’s work. And so amid some low giggles we did our exploration. Oh, here is the part that will tell you more than a little about Angelica. She also wanted to please me this night because she did not know, given the vagaries of the road, when we would be able to do it again. Practical girl."
[Caleb Marcus: Let’s move on, okay. I said my piece about Sally, oh did I tell you she visited me over in Wheeling a couple of times, a couple of Angelica-like time, a week when my spells got so bad I had to go to that damn VA hospital. Both times I went, before I gave her her walking papers. Impractical girl I’d say. ]
"In the groggy, misty, dark before dawn, half awake, no quarter awake night Angelica tapped me to get up. We quickly packed, she ate a little food (I could barely stand never mind do something as complicated as eat food), and we made our goodbyes, genuine this morning by all parties. As we went out the front trailer door and headed up the road to the place where Eddie had said to meet him I swear, I swear on all the dreams of whatever color that I have ever had, that the background mountains that were starting to take form out of the dark started to play, and to play like that music I heard last night from those demon fiddlers and banjo players. I asked, when we met Eddie, who was only a few minutes late, and who looked and felt (as he told me) worse than I did (except that he proudly stated that he was used to it, okay Eddie) if those musicians were still at it over at that old devil of a red barn. “No,” he said. “Where is that music coming from then?” I said. Old Eddie (backed by Angelica) said “What music?” That angel music I said. Eddie just looked bemused as he revved that old truck engine up and we hit the road west."
[Caleb Marcus: That’s when I started getting suspicious of Frank, that romantic stuff, not about his girl, hell, I could understand that, understand that a million ways, but that wind stuff like maybe he had some weed that night and between the weed and the golden liquor he got all disoriented. I know that happened to me a few times between spells when I needed something to drown out those gunshots and screams I kept hearing in my head and would not let me be.]
"Sometime later I was half-listening to some music, some background eerily haunting mountain music coming from a folk radio station when I had the strangest feeling that I had heard the tune before. I puzzled over it sporadically for a few days and then went to the local library to see if they had some mountain music available. They did and I began on that date a feverish re-acquaintance with this form of music, especially the various Carter Family combinations. I, however, never did find out the name of that song."
"And in a sense it has not name. It was the music from that old mountain wind as it trailed down the hills and hollows that I heard that last night in Prestonsburg. See here is what you didn’t know as you listened to all this stuff, and I only half knew it back then. I had been in Kentucky before that trip down from Steubenville, Ohio with sweet Angelica. No, not the way you think. My parents, shortly after they were married and after my father got out of the service, took a trip back to his home in Hazard so his family could meet his bride, or maybe just so he could show her off. They stayed for some period of time, I am not sure exactly how long, but the long and short of it was, that I was conceived and was fussing around in my mother’s womb while they were there. So see, it was that old mountain wind calling me home, calling me to my father’s roots, calling me to my roots as I was aimlessly searching for that great American West night. And here I am again, looking again. Double thanks, Angelica."
[CalebMarcus: “You had a hell of a story to tell Frank and welcome home, brother,” I said as I left Frank off at Millie’s Café in downtown Prestonsburg late in that same afternoon. Amen, brother, amen.]
[For those wondering about
the late part before his name in the title to this sketch Caleb Marcus Jackson
died in 1983 in a truck accident going around a tight bend up on Route 7
heading to the Ohio River. The police report said his body had alcohol and
drugs in it, and perhaps, it is true but, perhaps too, in the end, those hills
and hollows of home could no longer hold him in their thrall after he got back
to the “real” world. That wouldn’t be the first, or last, such case. RIP
Brother Caleb Marcus.-JLB]
