Hensley could.
Not in the dark, however. Never in the dark.
He walked out into the hollow and saw that night had not yet escaped the valley, nor was it in any hurry to leave. Nothing unusual about that. The stars, if they had lit the sky at all, were on the back side of the trees, and only fragmented splinters of moonlight ever fell past the branches far enough to touch his shoulder.
Bea Hensley had not looked at the clock when he left the chilled innards of his home. He didn’t need to. This was the time he awoke every morning.
It was three o’clock. He was not alone in the darkness.
“Morning, God,” he said.
No answer. He did not expect one, not spoken in an audible voice anyway.
“It’s me again.”
He knew God would recognize his voice, always did, never failed, but all he heard was the suffocating silence of the night. In the mountains, night arrived late and left the same way.
“Same as usual,” he said, getting straight to the point. “I need for you to give me a new idea. I don’t have one. You make ‘em up pretty regular. I need one, preferably by morning.”
Bea Hensley had never been stricken with ambition. All he had ever wanted to do was earn a decent living, and in the remote backwoods of Appalachia, he set up his shop and slowly gained recognition as one of the country’s most talented blacksmiths.
He did not shoe horses, no matter what the sign said. Bea Hensley fashioned ornate chandeliers, andirons, and candle stands from molten metal. He was an artist working in a different medium. That was all. He had a vision all his own.
The narrow road that ran in front of his shop brought the multitudes to Gillespie Gap. People from both sides of the mountain came to gaze at his work and marvel at the inspiration and genius behind his creations.
“Where did you get the idea to do something like that?” someone, sooner or later, always asked him.
Bea Hensley would only smile in a backwoods and humble sort of way. He never answered them directly. He could. But he didn’t. Only he knew the truth. The truth came from somewhere in the darkness, and there he was, back in the woods, carrying on a one-man conversation, as he always did, at three o’clock in the morning. Every morning it was always the same.
He was standing cloaked in the darkness and asking the Good Lord to send him a new idea. It did not even have to be a big one as long as it was a good one.
“Three o’clock’s a good time to talk to the Lord,” he told me.
“Why is that?”
“Neither me nor him is busy that time of night.”
Bea Hensley had a direct line, a clear and uninterrupted line, and he doubted if the Good Lord was sleeping anyway. The Lord never had to wait for his call. Bea Hensley was always right on time.
He closed his eyes and waited for a dose of inspiration to smite him. He never had to wait for very long.
The fire was already burning hot in the furnace, the bellows working overtime, and the strips of metal glowing somewhere between red and a bitter orange when the caravan of musicologists, looking as though they had just fled the ivy-covered walls of academia, straightened their ties, glanced around town, which didn’t take long, and knocked on his door.
The men were straight-backed, ashen-faced, mostly balding, and spoke in soft, melodious tones. They had spent most of the morning making their way down the back roads and lost roads and forgotten roads that wound their way from the innards of Spruce Pine and into Gillespie Gap.
One chanced a slight smile. He rocked back on his feet and said, “We’re from the Smithsonian,” as if that meant anything to the blacksmith.
Bea Hensley nodded.
“It’s in Washington, D.C.”
Bea Hensley nodded again.
“We’re doctors of music,” the distinguished gentleman said.
“Out here, we don’t get a lot of music,” Bea Hensley said, “and none of it that’s particularly sick.”
The musicologist couldn’t decide whether to chuckle or frown. He did not know whether the blacksmith was serious or not. He moved on. “We want to study your anvil,” he said.
“There’s plenty more out there,” Bea Hensley told him.
“I’m sure there are,” the gentleman said, clasping his hands together. “But none of them is quite like yours.”
“How do you know?”
“Word gets around.”
Bea Hensley smiled. A lot of good folks came to see his anvil. It had been back in 1938 when the self-styled blacksmith from the mountains stumbled across an old anvil in a New York junkyard.
It was old then: battered, scarred, blurred with rust, worn down, and thrown away amongst the weeds and scrap metal of broken down automobiles. It was where things of the past, no longer wanted or needed, were sent to die.
He bought the anvil with the last two dollars and fifty cents he had lodged in his pocket. Bea Hensley knew the anvil was different. He had no idea the anvil was magical.
It had never been his intention to become an artist. Being a blacksmith was good enough for him.
But that was before Bea Hensley picked up hammer and tongs and began to beat out odd little rhythms on the anvil.
After awhile, it seemed to just about everyone who dropped by that the rhythms sounded like some faint melody tucked away within the recesses of their minds. At three o’clock in the morning, while Gillespie Gap lay sleeping and no one was around to disrupt his one-sided conversation, Bea Hensley learned to turn those haunting melodies into art.
“What songs do you play on the anvil?” one of the musicologists asked.
“Don’t know.”
“Do you create your own songs?”
“Not me.”
“Why not?”
“Can’t carry a tune.”
The gentleman thought about chuckling, then frowned again. He still did not know whether Bea Hensley was serious or not.
The caravan of musicologists folded their arms, stood back in the dark corner of the blacksmith shop, wiped the sweat from their faces as the furnace roared behind them, and listened intently as Hensley turned molten metal into the shape of leaves falling from the hardwood trees outside. He ran the hammer from one end of the anvil to the other. High tones. Low tones. Soft tones. Tones right out of the 1812 Overture. Bea Hensley had it all. The volley of cannon fire, the ringing of the chimes. Tchaikovsky would have been proud.
For two
