| Share page | Visit Us On FB |
|
Hollers and Blues |
||
|
"Hopeless, remote, stark loneliness," I managed to say, for a feeling near to fear had tightened my heart.
"Enoch is like a shy bird of the night," Mrs. Tartt said. "Many people in Livingston have never seen him except perhaps after night when he flits by them in the darkness. Every night he comes out on the wooded end of the long bridge leading into Livingston and cries his woes to heaven. He lives alone in a cabin back in the woods. It will be a hard job to get him to sing into your microphone, but I'll try; Enoch is a little off, you know."
Two or three nights afterwards Enoch's cry rang out startlingly near. I ran out and found him standing like a piece of darkness itself near the trunk of a great oak tree. When I asked him to come nearer the microphone, he answered me with a burst of nervous, explosive laughter. I was a long time getting him near the machine where I could secure a recording. Between the hollers I could only catch the words,
"Just a few more weeks and I won't be here long"
He laughed again and seemed mightily pleased at the sound of his own voice when I played back the record. Neither then nor afterwards did he utter a spoken word.
The next December I sent Enoch a Christmas card in care of Mrs. Tartt. Probably he had never before received a letter. She delivered the card to Enoch on Christmas Day along with a big Christmas dinner. Enoch appeared the following day. No card but another dinner. For two weeks Enoch came back at dinnertime inquiring for another card.
"He thought your Christmas card was a meal ticket," commented Mrs. Tartt. —Adventures of a Ballad Hunter. |
||
|
[349] |
||