way like a thorn into Bob Duke’s mind.
The farmer had been right. He had said the time was two-fifteen, and it had not taken Duke more than thirty minutes to reach town. The farmer had known what time it was, and he hadn’t had a watch strapped either to his arm or dangling from a chain.
Duke was puzzled, then perplexed. He had traveled the high country of Appalachia for more than a year now, and he had long been amazed at the secrets of the mountain people. A rainbow in the evening was a sure sign that fair weather would follow, or so they said. When the trees split their bark in winter, they knew it would be a dry, hot spring, and crickets singing in the house foretold of a long cold winter. When a baby boy was born in the wane of the moon, they swore, the next child would be a girl, or maybe it was the other way round. March held the fisherman’s moon, and the hunter’s moon hung in a November sky. Now some farmer up on the side of the mountain could actually tell time without a watch.
How in the Good Lord’s name did he do it? Was it the angle of the sun as it dangled in the sky? Was it the length of the shadow that fell away from the oak above his head? Was it the way the sunlight filtered through the leaves and struck the rock at his feet? Surely the birds didn’t know, and the squirrels were barking about matters more serious than merely passing the time of day.
Mountain people did indeed have their secrets. Bob Duke knew he had to find out what this one was. He wouldn’t be able to sleep or travel on unless he did. Duke hid his suitcase behind the trash cans in a back alley behind the mercantile store and headed back up the steep mountainside.
He found the farmer. The farmer hadn’t moved. He was still milking his cow, or maybe it was another cow. But he had not moved.
“Excuse me, sir,” Bob Duke yelled.
The farmer barely turned his head. “You talking to me?” he asked again.
“Yes sir.” Duke rolled up the pale yellow sleeves on his shirt and said loudly. “I don’t know if you remember me, but I was up here a while back and asked you what time it was, and you told me, and you don’t have a watch or anything. I was wondering if, perhaps, you could show me the secret of your mountain ways. I’ve always heard that mountain people can do things other folks can’t do, and I’d like to be able to do it, too.”
The farmer turned around to face him, pushing his straw hat back on his head, and scratching his chin. He started to grin, then thought better of it. “So you want to know how I can tell time.”
“Yes sir.”
The farmer sighed. It had already been a long day. But then, most of his days were. “Then jump across that barrow ditch,” he said.
Bob Duke leaped the ditch.
“Get down on your hands and knees and crawl under that barbed wire fence.”
Bob Duke eased his way beneath the rusting barbs.
“Now come on over here beside this cow.”
Bob Duke hurried across the barn lot.
“And sit down on this stool.”
The farmer stood, and Bob Duke eased down onto the top of a wooden stool where the splinters had been worn down to a nub. The cow moved. Duke was too tired to be startled or care.
“Now put one hand on this teat,” the farmer said.
Bob Duke did as he was told.
“And put the other hand on this teat.”
Bob Duke reached for the nipple and squeezed it.”
“Now,” said the farmer, “if you look over the hind end of that cow, you can see the clock on the courthouse wall in downtown Johnson City.”
Bob Duke’s shoulders sagged.
His back ached.
The muscles in his legs tightened.
A cloud swallowed the sun.
There was no shadow dangling from the oak limbs above his head and no touch of light reflecting off the rock beneath him.
Time marched on.
On the mountain, it stood still.
Maybe it always had.
he walk down the mountain seemed a lot farther than the last time he made the trip.
Barter for The Bard
Somewhere on the outskirts of
Abingdon, Virginia
Pop: 7,780
The Scene: Abingdon, originally named Wolf Hills by Daniel Boone, remains as one of the oldest English-speaking settlements in the Blue Ridge highlands of Virginia. It is quirky in a charming sort of way. It is historic. It is filled with antique shops and crafts from mountain artisans.
The Sights: The brick sidewalks of Abingdon’s twenty-block historic district meanders past a collection of eighteenth and nineteenth century domestic and commercial buildings, showcasing the startling variety of architectural styles that appeared on the main thoroughfare of a rural Virginia town. Its Fields-Penn House Museum portrays the lifestyle of a prosperous family just prior to the War Between the States, and the Sinking Springs Cemetery is clustered with time-worn tombstones that date back as far as 1776.
The Setting: The Cornerstone of Abingdon has always been its Barter Theater, which began back during the Great Depression of the 1930s when good times and good entertainment were so hard to find. It is one of the nation’s oldest professional non-profit theaters, featuring musicals, comedies, dramas, and the classics, as well as modern plays penned by Appalachian and Southern playwrights. Appearing on the Barter Theater’s summer stock stages, through the years, have been such aspiring actors as Gregory Peck, Ernest Borgnine, Patricia Neal, Ned Beatty, Hume Cronyn, and Kevin Spacey. In 1946, it became the official State Theater of Virginia and, two years later, received a Tony Award for its contribution to regional theater.
There are those who say the Barter Theater is haunted. Actors swear they have caught glimpses of the ghost of its founder, Robert Porterfield, wearing his gray sweater and seated in the audience during rehearsals. Ned Beatty became so troubled and distraught after coming face to face with a sinister spirit that he ran from his dressing room and into the street outside the theater. It wasn’t an act.
The Story: For Robert Porterfield, it was like the last act of a bad play when the actors could not remember their lines, the curtain was hung up and wouldn’t fall, and the audience had begun leaving sometime shortly after intermission. If it could go wrong, it had, and there was nothing he could do about it.
The stage had gone dark.
The music had faded away.
The seats were as bare as the marquee.
Programs were left unprinted. Poster sheets with his name and sometimes his picture on them been had scattered with the winds. Actors used their scripts to build campfires in the park or down at the end of some back alley when they searched for shelter in the cold.
The footlights had dimmed, then gone out altogether.
The ticket window was closed. Men didn’t buy tickets when they could not buy food or soles for their shoes.
The cash register was empty.
An actor without a theater was an actor without a job.
He had learned the lines of a comedy and was confronted with act one of a tragedy. He walked the streets of New York, but they were as dark as the stage, as cold as a critic’s reviews, and leading him nowhere.
He had been there before.