Other Voices, Other Towns: The Traveler's Story. Caleb Pirtle III
troupe didn’t need the money. Members of the company already knew they had notched themselves a successful year. Together, they had gained slightly more than three hundred pounds.
Playwrights fully expected to receive royalties for their plays that were performed on the theatrical stage in Abingdon, Virginia. They generally received money. No. They always received money. Porterfield didn’t send them any. This was, after all, a barter theater. Instead of royalty payments, he sent whole Virginia hams to Noel Coward, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, and George Bernard Shaw.
No one complained, no one, that is, except the crusty and iconoclastic George Bernard Shaw. “How could you do this?” he asked Porterfield.
“It’s a perfectly good ham.”
“No doubt,” the eccentric Irish genius said. “But I am a vegetarian.”
Robert Porterfield understood. There were times, he knew, when he needed to make exceptions, and this was one of them. He apologized profusely. He swore that such a grievous error would never happen again.
Shaw accepted the apology. He sat back and awaited his royalty check.
Robert Porterfield sent George Bernard Shaw two crates of spinach.
Anvil With A Song
Somewhere on the outskirts of
Spruce Pine, North Carolina
Pop: 2030
The Scene: Spruce Pine nestles within the timbered ridges of the Blue Ridge Mountains that cut through the heart of North Carolina’s Appalachian country. The Blue Ridge contains the highest mountains in eastern North America with a hundred and twenty-five peaks climbing taller than five thousand feet.
The Sights: The highest in North Carolina is Mount Mitchell, reaching up for 6,684 feet, and the region can be viewed with a leisurely drive along the famed Blue Ridge Parkway, often regarded as America’s favorite highway. The road winds along the rooftop of the region, easing past mountain meadows with split rail fences surrounding old farmsteads and weaving together two national parks: Shenandoah in Virginia and the Great Smoky Mountains, which links Tennessee to North Carolina.
The Setting: Gillespie Gap, hidden away in the distant shadows of the Blue Ridge, nestles among such communities as Bald Creek, Rabbit Hop, and Hoot Owl Hollow. It is a land rich with artisans, its ridge lines settled in another century by a rare breed of independent, practical, and stubborn people who never asked for anything more than the Good Lord had given them.
From corn shucks they braided harnesses for mules and wove dolls, rugs, and scrub mops. From river cane and split oak came baskets. And leather was used to make their own shoes, vests, hats, rawhide chair bottoms, and even hinges for wooden doors. The creative mind of the artisan remains.
The Story: Perhaps for the first time this afternoon, Bea Hensley’s anvil was quiet, and there was total silence in Gillespie Gap. Even the winds had died away. Not even the winds dared interrupt when Bea Hensley had a new song to play. But then, not everyone could play a melody on an anvil.
Bea 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