allow.
“I were, Sar’n Major. Y’all take it easy, heah?” He got back on the bus.
Luther’s father walked over to the bus. They looked at each other, assessing the changes.
“It’s real good to have you home, Luther.” Luther’s father did not embrace his son.
They shook hands. “I’m tired, Daddy, real tired.”
Over the next few days Luther tried to explain himself to his father but couldn’t find the words. A day came when he blacked out and fell off the tractor. He lay in a dark red furrow of dirt groaning and dreaming.
His father sat in the field with him. He didn’t know what to do, so he sat with his son and prayed. He prayed for what every father who watches his child suffer prays for.
“Let it be me, Lord. Let me have the pain.” Fathers always imagine they are stronger than their sons when in fact they are only older.
Luther finally fell into a restless sleep. His father moved the tractor close to put the boy in the shade. It didn’t occur to him to go for a doctor. There wasn’t anything wrong with his son’s body.
Luther woke up at dusk. It came slow before he realized where he was, what had happened. His father held his hand as he had when Luther was a little boy.
“I’m sorry to trouble you, Daddy, real sorry.”
“Don’t matter none. There’s jess you an me. Y’all need time. Done too much, always did, even when you was a little boy.”
“I don’t know how long this is goin’ to take.” Luther looked across the fields to the purple mountains behind. “I’m glad Mama didn’t see me this way.”
“She’d a’ been fine, boy. That woman had grit, and a gentle nature. Don’t know that I evuh heard her say an unkind word to anyone.” He smiled at Luther, then looked away into the distance.
“Musta been a thousand times I wondered what she seen in me. I weren’t winnin’ no beauty contests in those days. “She was the accountant at Tolliver’s Mercantile: finished high school too! Imagine that. You know up in the north they call us rednecks like it was a dirty word. As if we don’t do nuthin’ but drink moonshine likker and hang black folks.”
He didn’t let go of his son’s hand. He worried Luther would go away if he did.
“Your Mama didn’t mind my red neck, which it sure ‘nuff is,” he chuckled.
Luther looked at his father with surprise and affection. He hadn’t ever talked about Luther’s mother that he could remember.
“I’d a like to been better educated, but it weren’t in me. Then the Depression ‘n all, trying to keep food on the table. Got this here red neck workin’ the farm, raisin’ crops for other folks. Lord, I ain’t had a decent drink of ‘shine in more’n three years; ‘n as far as black folks go, I couldn’t get so mad at a man, black or white, I wouldn’t go out and take care of buiness personal. Don’t need no dang fool bed sheets and burnin’ crosses. It ain’t Christian.”
Luther looked at his father. He didn’t remember his mother very well. She had died when he was three. He never realized how much his father missed her.
Chapter 6
A month after Luther returned from Korea he knew it wasn’t going to get better. He’d blacked out three times that he could remember. He couldn’t concentrate long enough to do a decent day’s work.
He went looking for his father and found him in the barn putting up hay, his face sweaty, streaked with dirt and chaff. Nathan Cole stuck the pitchfork into the hay and motioned Luther out side. They sat on a wooden bench and looked across the fields.
Luther’s father wiped his face with a checkered cloth and slowly rolled a cigarette. The leaf was rough cut and pungent. He grew and cured his own tobacco like his father had before him.
“Not goin’ too good, is it, Luther.”
“No, Daddy. I feel worse ‘cause it troubles you. I know you don’t mind, but it bothers me somethin’ terrible.” His father waited patiently. Luther went on.
“What kind ‘a shape is granddaddy’s place up on the mountain?” Luther looked toward the hills turning orange in the sunset.
“Why boy, I don’t rightly know. Been four, maybe five years since I been up there. Went huntin’ with Cousin Joe Barkwood up that way.” He took a drag on his homemade, and watched the blue smoke catch on the wind.
“He built it good, mostly stone, red oak, and pine. Door still worked: roof weren’t broke. Course that slate probly last three hundred year. Went down to the spring. Big jack pine fallen down and messed it up some, but the waters’ still sweet. “Man could make good whiskey with that water.” He paused to stamp his cigarette out in the dirt. “You fixin’ to go up there are yuh?”
“Uh, huh.”
“Bothers me some to think you might come on one of yer spells out in the forest with no one to look after yuh.”
“Figured it would, Daddy, but I got to do it. I just cain’t stay here no more. I’ll be alright, stay close to the cabin and all. Gonna go to Elkins, get me a new pickup, some tools and such. I’ve got me the money from the medal and my mustering-out out pay. Don’t need much. I’ve got to live simple, not be no trouble to no one.”
Luther raised his hand as his father started to speak. He reached out an took his father’s worn hand.
“I know you don’t figure I’m trouble, but I do, and it makes it harder, a lot harder.”
Luther’s father looked down at his son’s hand, so much like his own. “All right, boy, you do what you want, you’ve the right.”
PADUA, ITALY, 1719
The night was hot, close. The “civilized” world was still tortured by the idea that windows must be kept closed to prevent the night air, source of evil humors and of a multitude of diseases, away from the body.
Against the advice of his wife, Tartini had eaten two game pies. Now he paid the price. He went to bed early. It took a long time getting to sleep.
The dream came slowly, without form, and then there he was, making a pact with the Devil. It went well. He felt no remorse, no Faustian indecision.
The Devil asked if he might play his violin, the Hercules. Tartini gave it to him out of curiosity. Then he was amazed to hear the Devil play a sonata so miraculous and beautiful that it exceeded all imagination.
It enchanted Tartini. His breath stopped and he awoke. He reached for his violin, the Hercules, to reproduce some of the sounds he heard in his dream.
As he told the French violinist, Lalande, years later, “The music I composed at that moment is no doubt the best I ever wrote - and I call it the Devil’s Sonata - but it is a far cry from what I heard in my dreams.”
