
p. 7 of 8
Something about how the sun streamed down through the afternoon kept me from sensing I was high or drunk—I leaned on my elbows back against the rock and felt indistinct from the lichen and the hot air, and the booze and reefer were instruments to gently stoke this fire: to maintain the heat it gave off, rather than further arouse it.
And our movements simply had an unaffected looseness when, under a sky becoming a darker cast of blue, we sauntered and strode up to the cabins to collect Clayton Jones, and then all had dinner while the sun was making the tree tips behind Main House turn red.
After dinner, Daniels produced a bottle of bourbon and we all walked back down to the creekside campfire, drinking from mugs and jostling ourselves with instrument cases as we went (I was carrying Fairweather’s old fiddle, which he’d gotten out so I could jam along with them). Only when we got to the jam spot—and Fairweather sat down at the upright and placed his precarious bourbon on the stand, and Lambardi looked for level ground for his hand drums while the rest of us settled about on logs—did I start feeling that the movements I was making were clumsy compared to how I intended, and not fast or refined enough in this world.
So it’s dark and soon there’s a fire leaping in the makeshift pit and we’ve all re-donned outer layers and beside us the creek is running. Moon.
Instruments get lifted out of cases and the guys just launch right into traditionals—whooping out lines about the uncomplicated wanting of things like cherry pie, careening through dances that long ago migrated from Ireland to Kentucky. I never have a chance to realize I’ve gotten low on bourbon because I’m sitting next to Daniels, who’s still got the bottle and who keeps splashing his mug and mine. He and I cheers each other a bunch of times. Everyone is flickering. And it’s taken me until now to feel impaired—now that I’m jamming with the Your Exes. A few songs in, I set down the fiddle. A hand reaches out from the dark somewhere and offers me a joint, and I take it and pop it in my mouth and lean back, the joint wilting between my lips while I brace myself with both hands against the flat portion of the log behind me.
And it was then the Your Exes began to play the old songs.
I had never heard the old songs before, but they were profoundly familiar. They were plain. The melodies were strings of short phrases all alike or identical to one another, and speaking their piece over chords with which they had differences beyond the saying – partings-of-way not selfish but hushedly exalted. The melodies passed above these chords like humble, hewn bridges over chasms. And the songs were both the bridges and the chasms.
Or a melody might be all unbroken concord – like you’d entered a home with bouquets set out on tables and needlework samplers on the walls – until there slipped by one unforeseen note that cast all the song into a strange and other light—as if the home’s aspect had been altered in a moment when, looking at a pastoral painting hung above the mantelpiece, you noticed that there, in the grass near the cow, a red forked tail was mildly waving.
I can’t remember any of the old songs’ lyrics (in truth I cannot seem to remember the melodies either—though now and then I will hear a fragment), but I remember that more than once the Exes left off words and oohed.
They played simply. There was no virtuosity.
I blinked awake, lying on the ground with a blanket over me. The meditation was over and all the Exes were prostrating themselves before the fire, foreheads and palms to the dirt, backs like planks. Cicadas were stereophonically rattling to and from their volume-plateaus. Everything I’d ingested was so heavy on me that I could hardly move my body, but I managed to turn my head and look up at the fire. The flames were licking incredibly high. Right at their center, I saw an empty space, like a column of black.