“I been knowed to strum my hands across nigh anything with strings.” He handed the empty cup back to Porter. Porter asked Hatcher, “You only play the fiddle?” “Drink, friend!” When Jack took the tin, Porter turned to Bass. Nathan Porter pierced the ring formed by others to shove a cup at Hatcher. Some of the trappers chose to put their cups to their lips, there behind the tins to blink their moist eyes clear others chose to snort and hack, clearing throats clogged thick with sentiment. A song about women-a matter even more mysterious than religion.įor long moments the last note hung in the still, cool air of that summer eve at the south shore of Sweet Lake, men struck dumb by the sweetness of the song, by its mournful sentiment. This was a song not about church and ancient biblical characters in a time distant and dim, not a song about things religious and mysterious … no, at this moment he was singing a song about a subject most boys came to understand as they grew to manhood. But this tune was something he had heard others sing around campfires those long-ago summer evenings at the Boone County Longhunter Fair, heard again while rocking on Amy Whistler’s porch of an early autumn evening, heard even at his family’s hearth before a merry fire as the long winter night deepened in the Kentucky forest around their farm. That is, except when his mam took him and his brothers and sister to Sunday meeting and they all were raised singing those songs settlers on the frontier memorized in early childhood. He couldn’t remember the last time he had sung when folks were around.
Rather, he was merely shy of using it in the hearing of others. Titus never had thought he had a bad voice. I’m going to serenade her and I’ll sing this song.
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