Long Way Gone by Charles Martin

difference in the color of their skin, I began to guess that some people came just to see what all the fuss was about.
    One of the perks of a large stature was a barrel chest and booming baritone with enough volume to carry between mountain ranges. Dad seldom used a microphone. Big-Big had bear paws for hands and his fingers were the size of sausages, but he could light up a piano. I still don’t understand how he made the chords without double-punching every other key. I used to sit and watch his fingers glide across the keyboard. Often the church we were visiting would lend their choir to fill in where Mom had left off and add a much-needed female voice.
    Whenever we returned home, Dad would unload and then hike up through the aspens. After several minutes, his voice would echo back to me. Always the same song. While my ears may have heard the melody and my mind may have understood the words, it was my heart that got pulled on. It was a lament. A song of loss. I guess Dad could sing it with such emotive clarity because he’d known such emotional pain.
    One night when he returned, eyes red and wet, I asked him, “Dad, what’s that song?”
    He poured himself some coffee and we sat on the porch, where he propped his feet up on the railing. Colorado stretched out before us. I could see west for nearly two hundred miles.
    Dad was quiet several minutes. “Somewhere in the sixteenth or seventeenth century,” he began, “a blind harpist named O’Cahan wrote that tune. It survived two hundred years until an itinerant fiddler played it one night on the streets of England. History does not record the fiddler’s name, but a music collector named Jane Ross heard and transcribed the tune and published it. Called it ‘O’Cahan’s Lament.’ The tune lay dormant awhile until some folks named Weatherly came from England to these very mountains looking for silver.” Dad waved his hand across the landscape.
    “Most, if not all, of the silver rush occurred within eyesight of where you now sit, so I like to think that what happened next had something to do with these hills. Your mom certainly thought so.” Dad sipped his coffee. “Things get a bit complicated here, but an Irish-American woman named Jess Weatherly played the tune for her brother-in-law Fred, who was something of a songwriter. Turns out that over the course of his life he wrote and published some fifteen hundred songs. He’d written a song some years prior but had never attached the right melody to the words. Somewhere around 1911 or 1912, Jess played that tune for Fred. He reshaped the lyrics he’d written to fit the tune and published the song you hear me singing.”
    We watched in silence as clouds filtered through the mountaintops.
    “In my limited education, it’s probably the best ballad ever written. There’s something that happens in the rise and fall of the melody that speaks to us on a level that’s deeper than our thinking. It was sung at President Kennedy’s funeral and has been recorded by everyone from Judy Garland and Bing Crosby to the Man in Black.” Dad smiled. “Elvis said he thought it’d been written by angels and asked for it to be played at his funeral. You probably don’t remember this, but the night your mom died, she asked me to lay you next to her in the hospital bed. She wrapped her arm around you and sang it to you while you went to sleep in her arms.” Dad stopped. He was quiet a long while. “I sat next to the bed and tried to listen.” He motioned to the aspens. “So sometimes . . . I go there to remember.”
    I waited a minute or two before I asked, “Will you teach it to me?”
    Dad nodded slowly.
    “You want me to get Jimmy?”
    “Jimmy stays quiet on this one.” Dad set down his cup, cleared his throat, and tried to sing, but something choked out the words. “This might be tougher than I thought.” He tried again, and this time the words came.
    “O Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling . . .”
    Over