Sheba and her grandmother, Bethel, stroll down the road toward the square dance in the gathering shadows of the gloaming. Already summer has died. This is a world made of trees, and they are all showing their colors before they fall, the mountains ablaze with orange and red and yellow. The only green on the ridges lives on the beeches, which hold on until the very last, and the pines and hemlocks, which have their own clumps here and there. It is not cold enough yet for their breath to show before the women’s mouths, but autumn is creeping in.
“Any day now we’ll have to drag out our wool socks,” Bethel says, whispering without realizing it.
Although Sheba has been talking she hushes now, for she sees that the gloaming is fully upon them. She thinks that speaking would be disrespectful, somehow, as this time of day ought not be disturbed. Sheba has always loved the gloaming; it is her favorite time of day. She is comforted by the stillness that falls down over the land when twilight starts to show above the ridges. There is the silence, too; it is like the whole world has stopped to hold its breath for that one moment of gray and purple shadows, that time between day and night. All the little live things of the woods stop, and even the birds quit their singing.
“In the gloaming, oh my darling,” Sheba sings, “when the light is dim and low.”
Just the one line, and the words carry out over the close, dark trees and up onto the face of the hovering mountain, where cold rock cliffs jut out of the summit like a row of chimneys. After this brief burst of song, the silence seems even thicker. And then, all the trees exhale at the same time and it is night, good and proper. The stars have only begun to brighten into existence and the moon is a white melon rind.
“Why’d you quit?” Bethel says, still speaking low. “You have the prettiest voice I ever heard in my life, and you’ll barely let it slip out even in front of me.”
“I don’t know,” Sheba says, embarrassed. She wishes she was able to set free a song more often, in front of people. But she cannot. Automatically she thinks to herself that she doesn’t understand why, but really, she does. It’s on account of her eyes, which are solid white. Sheba is 25 years old and ought to be used to the staring by now, but she isn’t. Sometimes she thinks that maybe she is just imagining the looks, but then she reminds herself of her coin-like eyes and the way her mother has always been terrified of them, especially when Sheba was a baby. For the longest time her mother had thought they were the mark of the devil.
People here don’t like for things to be different. Sheba has never been outside of Sevier County, Tennessee, her whole life, but she figures that this is most likely true of everywhere in the world. The funny thing is that as much as she feels people staring at her, nobody will ever meet her gaze when she looks them in the eye. Sometimes a bolt of defiance runs up her spine, and she just turns to whomever’s stare is burning through her, but that’s when they look away. This night she wishes she could get up and sing in front of the whole crowd, just to show them what lives inside her. Maybe then they’d know that a person is more than their eyes.
So far it seems to her that the only person she knows who really understands this is Dave. Dave lives right up the road from them and is the one person who will look her right in the eye when he is talking to her. He is just two years her junior, and she has known him all his life. Dave is also the only person who has just come right out and asked what everyone wonders: Does she not need eyeglasses? (“No, I can see just fine,” she told him, “and the doctor says this is amazing.”) Does the sun hurt her eyes especially? (“Yeah, it does.”) Does the doctor know what it is? (“He calls it ocular albinism.”) She did not tell Dave that she likes to say this phrase aloud when she is alone; it has a pleasing sound.
Sometimes she lies awake at night and imagines the backs of Dave’s hands, which are brown and square. Big round veins rise there, and he always has some kind of scrape or cut across the backs of his knuckles from working out in the fields. She has longed to put her lips to the backs of his hands for nearly ten years now. Dave is playing banjo at the square dance tonight. Sometimes at the dances he brings her a NuGrape drink on the breaks. They stand outside and look at the stars, and he drinks a peach Nehi while she takes sups from her pop, and there is an easy silence between them that is somehow better than talking. He has never offered to kiss her or even hinted at anything other than friendship, but he knows she is more than her eyes. Once he leaned in so close to her that their arms touched. She had caught a whiff of him; he had smelled like the inside of a hickory nut, sharp and sweet at the same time. When they are not being quiet with each other, they laugh and cut up and talk about everything in the world.
Dave is also the only person she has ever sung for besides her mother and grandmother. She was hanging the wash out one day and caught sight of him passing through the spring woods on the ridge trail — the leaves no bigger than fox ears — with an axe over his shoulder. He had been working in the hills all day and was bare-chested, so he hadn’t stopped to speak, trying to pass by undetected. She acted like she didn’t know he was there, and started singing “Don’t Forget This Song” before she even knew that she was opening her mouth. Later, she didn’t know why she had picked such a strange, scary song, but that’s what had come to her in the moment. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that he had paused up there on the path. Later he had admitted to her that he had eavesdropped on her singing. “There ain’t words to describe it,” he had said. “I never heard such a good sound.”
Sheba’s voice is as high and clear as the ring of a blacksmith’s hammer; she has a bird’s song caught in her chest. Everyone in her family claims it is the most beautiful sound they have ever heard and Sheba knows they are not just saying this because they are kin. There is no arrogance about her, but she knows it is true. A thing of such beauty is undeniable, even to its keeper. Perhaps that is partly why she doesn’t sing in front of people. Because a person has to have something all their own, something they don’t give away, and this is her one true thing. Still, a gift is not worth much if one cannot share it with others.
“Lord, honey, if you’d just sing in front of them one time, nobody’d ever think about them eyes again,” Bethel says, as if reading her mind. “They’d just be thinking about that voice.” Bethel is primping already, patting her pincurls and smoothing her dress while she talks. Bethel is nigh on 60 years old but is the most popular woman at any of these dances. Even at her age, she is still lean and beautiful and most importantly she is wild as a buck deer. If she weren’t so old, she’d be a complete scandal. Sometimes she even goes outside to drink with the men. She smokes and leans back her head to laugh, showing her tonsils, and when she’s hot she unbuttons the top two buttons on her dress and takes one of the church fans and shakes it in the air over her cleavage. People are always saying that she is “a sight,” but everyone thinks the world of her. That’s just how Bethel is; people can’t help but love her.
Bethel is nothing like her daughter, Sheba’s mother, who won’t leave the house and won’t admit that Sheba’s father is never coming back. He ran off to the log camps in Waynesville when Sheba was just a little thing, not even five years old, and they haven’t heard a peep from him since. He’s rumored to be working with the National Park crews, cutting the roads up to Clingmans Dome, now, but Sheba nor her mother have laid eyes on him. Sheba doesn’t care, although some 20 years later, her mother cannot get over it. She just reads her Bible and falls down praying at unexpected, inopportune times. She’d absolutely die if she knew Sheba and Bethel were attending this square dance. They always tell her they’re going to a camp meeting or a brush arbor service somewhere. Since she won’t leave the house — “I’m too shamed over your father going off,” she says — she never knows the difference. Bethel says it’s not wrong to lie because a square dance is much like church anyway. “But way more fun,” Bethel always says, laughing, and lights up a cigarette as they leave Sheba’s mother leaning on the porch post, looking out on the cove as if it is an endless sea of trees.
As they reach the crest of the ridge, a whippoorwill calls out.
“Lord, listen to that,” Bethel says. “Lonesomest old sound I ever heard.”
Sheba knows this bird’s song is lonesome, but it is beautiful, too, the sound of pining. Everyone says how the bird is calling for its mate, but Sheba doesn’t think so. She believes the whippoorwill is mourning life, period. The beauty and hardness of it. No, he is not calling for a loved one. The whippoorwill’s call is the way she feels inside all the time, a tangle of anticipation and stillness. She loves that the bird can’t help but let out this song, yet every call is preceded by a short stumble of hesitation.
She stops, right in the middle of the narrow dirt road, and waits for him to call again, although Bethel is moving along faster now that they are nearing the school-house where the square dance is happening. Within two or three steps Bethel is lost to the gathered darkness, and Sheba might as well be all alone with the trees and the night-birds.
“Whip. Poor-will!” he calls again, and Sheba feels an overwhelming urge to answer him. She cups her hands to her mouth and starts to return his own song to him, but just as she is about to, there is a rush of wings and a simultaneous flutter of leaves, and she knows that the whippoorwill is flying right past her, so close that she can feel the wind of his passing on her face. She fancies that she can smell him, his scent dark and musky like the underside of an old tree limb when you turn it over.
This feels like a blessing.
“Sheba!” Bethel’s concerned call from down the road. “What’re you doing?”
Sheba puts her hands to her cheeks as if dashing water on her face and takes a deep, shuddering breath. A wind, no more than a stirring of air, laces through the leaves, and above the trees the moon is striped now by thin fingers of black clouds. Anything seems possible. Change can come quick as clouds moving in, as quick and sudden as the gloaming slides in between day and night.
Sheba runs to catch up with Bethel, who is just a black figure standing with her hands on her hips, down the road. Sheba can see the orange dot of her burning cigarette where Bethel’s mouth ought to be.
When she catches up with her grandmother, Bethel rushes them along. She is stepping lively now for she can hear the sounds of the square dance below. Bethel loves nothing more than to dance, and she’s good at it, too. Everyone — even the real young men — fight over who is going to partner with her. There is a sawing fiddle and Dave’s clucking banjo, which is louder than any of the other music, and the strum of a guitar, the voice of the caller: “Down the center! Cast off!” Sheba knows they are doing the Virginia Reel. She and Bethel can even hear the stomp of feet on the school-house floor and the low voices and high laughter of all the people who are gathered outside, smoking and drinking from bottles and jars.
This clamor drowns out all the real noise of the woods that has risen up with darkness. Sheba looks back but can no longer hear the call of the whippoorwill. He is left to his own loneliness.
…
As soon as they go in, someone offers his hand to Bethel and she takes it, joining the square dance without missing a beat. Sheba stands near the edge of the dance floor, but instead of casting her eyes down she looks right out at the dancers, and their pleasure makes her so happy that she laughs out loud. Her joy is lost to the music. But this sensation fills her, lifts her up, and she believes that tonight she might be able to do anything at all. Tonight, she might be able to break free.
The boys are on fire with Chester sawing away on that fiddle and Crawdad bent low over his Gibson, his head bobbing a little to the beat and Dave making that banjo talk.
Right now Dave looks up from his banjo long enough to meet her eyes, as if he has felt her gaze burning into the top of his head. He nods at her and she sees a little smile play across his lips.
Just as the song ends, Sheba drifts back down to herself and realizes that she has walked up behind Dave, and now she is leaning over and whispering into his ear, and then she is walking out in front of the band, and they are playing the song she has loved for so long, the song she has heard the Carter Family sing on the radio so many lonesome nights. She knows that as of now she is leaving those still evenings behind her for good. A change has to start somewhere.
She looks out into the crowd, some of whom are dancing and some of whom are watching her, and she opens her mouth to sing. The words flow out of her like a river, like light. She feels that her voice is not only coming out of her mouth, but it is also shooting out of her fingertips. Sometimes, when a song hits her like this, it is all she can do to keep from floating right off the floor, the words are so good:
Last night the pale moon was shining
Last night when all was still
I was wandering alone in sadness
Out among the woodland hills
Sheba clenches her hands shut and open, shut and open, her fingers curling into her palms so that her nails bite into the skin, but her hands are tough and it doesn’t hurt.
It is the kind of feeling she cherishes, one that reminds her she is alive, and it makes her sing harder and with even more feeling. She has felt the power of music before, but never like this. She has faced them, she has laid herself bare, so now she can close her eyes and feel the words even better, each word like a slow, perfect explosion of fireworks in her mind’s eye:
I heard the birds a-singing
Out among the trees and hills
And all the birds, my darling
Were singing, were singing of you
She keeps singing, and she realizes the change that has come over her. She feels like an altogether different woman. Although she has been singing since she was a little child, she has never felt this taken aback by a song before. She has never just gone absolutely, completely out of her body and given herself to the music this way. As the song ends, she opens her eyes and watches as Chester pulls the final, best notes out of the song on his fiddle. In that moment she realizes that everyone is clapping; even the dancers have turned to face her, and they are all applauding and looking at her as if they’ve never seen her before. Sheba thinks to herself that maybe she was the one who always saw herself a certain way instead of them. Maybe they’ve just been waiting for her to join in the square dance all this time instead of lurking in the shadows with her arms folded, her head cast down. Sheba glances back at Dave, and he mouths “Take a bow,” with a big smile on his mouth and in his eyes. He nods at her, and although his voice is lost to the applause she knows he is saying “Go on.” So she bows. Tonight she has become a part of the song itself. She is a note, the melody, the music, and all at once she knows what that feels like. This knowledge fills her with such newfound power that she thinks she might never, ever be the same.
From author Silas House:
“Don’t Forget This Song” brewed in my head for several years before I ever got it down on paper. I’ve always loved writing about the power of music and the power of nature, so both those forces come together in this story. The impetus for me finally getting it down on paper occurred one night as I was sitting out on my back porch, reading, very late at night. I heard the first whippoorwill of the summer call and knew that I had to incorporate that beautiful, lonesome sound into a story, and that Sheba’s story was just the one. I especially liked that the story’s whippoorwill calls out in the fall of the year, although one usually only hears a whippoorwill call during the summer. This seemed to lend it even more of an air of magical realism. After I wrote that part in, the whole story all came together. That’s what I love about writing: it’s like working a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes you have to hunt for years to find that final piece, but it always turns up eventually. Whenever I’m in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park I always think about the people who lived there before the park came in, how they had lives in those coves. So I wanted to set it in the land that would eventually be swallowed up by the park, to show a slice of that and remind people that there were others here, long before us. They were people who loved and longed and cried and laughed. And they deserve to be remembered.
About author Silas House:
Silas House is the author of the novels Clay’s Quilt (2001), A Parchment of Leaves (2002), The Coal Tattoo (2004), and the play “The Hurting Part” (2005). He has won two Kentucky Novel of the Year Awards, the Award for Special Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Appalachian Book of the Year, the Chaffin Award, and many others. He is a two-time finalist for both the Southeast Booksellers Award and the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize. House recently collaborated with actress Ashley Judd and producer Alex Rose (Norma Rae, Overboard, etc.) on a film that is in line for production. House is also a member of the traditional music duo The Doolittles, as well as a member of the band Public Outcry, a group of writers and activists who visit universities to educate people about mountaintop removal mining. His writing has been published in such magazines as The Oxford American, Bayou, The Southeast Review, Night Train, The Beloit Fiction Journal, The Louisville Review, and many others. House lives in Eastern Kentucky, where he was born and raised.