Harmon Jackson

Abstract

Harmon Jackson Brittany Hampton The crickets weren't chirping too awful loud the night I mourned for Harmon Jackson. I had never laid eyes on him, but I had heard his story about how he saved that little girl from drowning in the river and the two of them nothing but mud from top to bottom paraded through the holler like they were somebody important, because I reckon that day they had been. And there was also the time Harmon Jackson stood up in the little church across the way where they stand and shake all over and said, "Preacher, I got something to say." And he told the whole congregation that God had put something on his heart, and there'd be no rest for him until he said his peace, so he just said it right then that he thought church ought to be on Saturday, like it was back in the Bible times, and you can imagine the whipping he got when he got back to the house that day. They say he picked out his own switch for that beating, a right big branch and told his Daddy that if he was going to take a beating on account of his religion, he wanted it to be a darn good one. But my favorite story of Harmon Jackson was the one about the banjo. He had his own banjo that his Daddy got from some feller from Virginia, and they say he would play one song and no others, and he played it for hours on end, and nobody ever knew what it was. He'd sit out on a rock near the creek, and people would crowd around him and shout out guesses of the tune's name, but only Harmon Jackson knew what he was playing. And they say he smiled and nodded his head as he sang it, paying no mind to anything but the song. And it was on account of all this that I took up a notion to love Harmon Jackson. I would sit in front of the fire on Sunday evenings and think on the life I might have with that boy someday. He would take me up to Cumberland Falls to get married right there in the water. We'd stand in the shallow water and balance ourselves on the slippery rocks, holding on close to each other so we wouldn'tbe carried over the falls. And I reckon a boy like Harmon Jackson with such a wild spirit would need him a house full of little boys to run around the woods and build forts and carry on with. And when the snow would fall in big, puffy flakes and ice would form little pictures on our windows, Harmon Jackson would gather our children around the fire, inside our 55 warm little kitchen. He'd close his eyes and let his dark hair fall over them. He'd reach that strong arm of his behind the chair and pick up his banjo. The thing would be all shiny, seeing that I would polish it up for him every morning, and he would plop it onto his lap. He wouldn't play anything for a few seconds; he'd like to sit there and feel the weight of the banjo on his lap, thinking to himself that it belonged there. He might even feel a little guilty that he left it sitting behind the chair all day, without so much as plucking a string as he passed. And right when I would look away from that handsome man sitting in the chair, he'd start to playing, but he wouldn't sing. He'd just sit there picking while I would wash our supper dishes in a big pot of steaming water and him teaching our children the song without a name. So when my Mama came home from town, saying she had a sad thing to tell me about that boy Harmon Jackson and how he had died, I just shook my head and said, "No, Mother." I wouldn't hear such a thing, because it meant that our waterfall wedding and our children would be no...