The knock on our trailer door came at 7:55 Friday night just as we were viewing the end of Babylon 5, our current Future addiction. Truman — “Boomer” — as he was called by his fellow Kentucks, was dressed mostly in black. “We’es gatherin’ to sing some,” Boomer said, peering into the black hole of our trailer. “Ya comin? Fire’s catching up, and people’s agatherin’.”

Jo gave him an affirmative and, while catching the last scenes from TV’s Space, pulled her guitar out of its case and laid it on the bed. Our dog Mandy, not dogged by man’s supposed future, just wanted back out so she could dig some more cool earth from her hole under the trailer. The night was warm and the wet fantasies of the dew point were hours away. It seemed the perfect night to be out under the sky singing old-time gospel music with hill country friends from the great State of Kentucky.

Boomer had built the fire in a cast-off truck rim which served as a place. The old metal glowed deep orange-red in spots where the oak and cedar fire touched it. The fire’s light mixed with the yardlight’s pale blue rays, to give the skin of those seated around the rim a spooky look. The moon had fallen off to the west, behind some clouds that planned to stay all night.

Truman couldn’t sing or hold a note. He was the organizer and coordinator of the event. He had the fire going, but now had only wet cedar to put on it. He got chairs for people who appeared around the rim, an old quart of transmission fluid for fire-start, and generally acted as host.

Jo hitched her guitar up by its strap, and with her long dark hair held tightly in a bun at the back of her head by a large plastic hair clip, made her way back from our trailer into the parts of the park where people who came for the whole of winter camp. The tangled branches of the great oaks and the streamers of lacy Spanish Moss made a roof over the paths she followed. Way back, she found the rim and the Kentucky people who had gathered to “Hear some pickin’ and sing along on some.”

It wasn’t necessary to introduce everyone around the fire. Names were either already known and had been for years, or they weren’t important ’cause who would remember? People could be described, if one was inclined to do so, by an item of clothing or some physical characteristic that jumped out at you. Best was to know them by how they sang or played, or maybe by the instrument they tickled.

Beneath layers of skin built up over time, one could still see the cut of Bartel’s face when young, and get an idea of the callow man past. He stood away from the group, near his white Chevy pick-up, and hunched over his mandolin so he could hear it sing its tune. He twisted the tuners and twitched his thumb against the strings until he was satisfied that it was clear. Hunched over a little as if to protect the precious instrument from the night air, he ambled back into the circle of friends and sat in an old aluminum lawn chair, eyeing the guitarist next to him.

Jo could see the mandolin for the first time. It was a precious thing, a Gibson “f” hole made in the teens of the century. He had added an electronic gismo of a pick-up to its face, but that was the only indicator that the beautiful box looked any different than it had when it hung from the ceiling display wires of the tiny shop in Paducah in 1911, and a music man, now dead and forgotten, had fallen in love with it and taken it home.

Plucked, the mandolin sang-out with a clear voice. The sheer pleasure of it sent shivers through the old ladies chaired around the flaming rim. They crossed their legs and moved their shoulders around under their shawls. It got them quiet then, for a breath, and made the guitar man stop his picking and tuning and look up.

“We together?” The guitar man asked by way of making a statement of need. He smiled with energy radiating from beneath his silver crown of hair. He turned his guit-fiddle on its side in his lap, and twanged a cord, looking right at Jo. She twanged “E” back, and hit a little run of musical colors for him to evaluate.

The mandolin couldn’t hold still for the vibrations. It twanged back at the others, seeking agreement somewhere along the scales. Then all three instruments began to vibrate and come alive, and a player rose to voice and let flow a string of notes that first reminded Jo of an old coon dog baying off in the distance, or an old scratchy 78 record of bluegrass masters from times gone.

Music began to ease out into the night air. Some around the glowing rim were energized by it and their mouths went off long before their brains could follow, saying things that may have made sense. Others closed their eyes down to squints and stretched their feet out towards the rim. One lady got so bothered that she jumped up, mumbling something about getting the coffee, and disappeared around the trailers to her own.

Boomer leaned over toward me, sitting as we were on two sides of an old wooden picnic bench. “Met on the church bus, most of us that is. I was about fourteen I guess, maybe fourteen.” He leaned the other way and caught his wife with his words. “Them others, most met that way, didn’t they, remember?” She nodded and looked right at me. “Truman and me, we didn’t. But them others, all of them got acquainted on the Church Bus.” She looked at Boomer. “Before the bridge, remember? We had to take the ferry across the river. I was a girl, and I loved looking in the driver’s mirror and watching some of ’em kiss.”

“We’s all been acquainted through our Churches,” Boomer added, taking just a minute to get back into sync with the music. “I don’t belong to any now, but I go to several and sit just to hear the music.”

The guitar man had heard Boomer and his wife talkin’ history. He stopped picking, placed the guitar on his leg, and added, “Sometimes we gets so involved in pickin’ that we forgets to have a sermon.” His wife looked up sharply, and interjected, “But we needs the words too, you know. We need the words more maybe.”

Others got into their own side conversations about their past. Through the mixmash of conversations, Jo could hear testimonies to Jesus’s work and references to times “Before I was saved.” In the gap without music only the mandolin player kept picking, but nobody seemed to hear the laughter that fell from his strings.

“Doyaknow this’un?” The guitar man asked as he cranked his guitar over onto its back like an innocent girl and plucked a tune. He laid out another gospel song that talked of leaving this life and going to find Jesus. “I don’t call it heaven, I call it home,” he sang. The others picked up the tune and filled the camp with a dirge of sound. Heads nodded, eyes filled with tears. The song was close to the reality they lived; to a time of life that brought each mind to thoughts of life ending. “That’s fer Jesus,” one said. “That’s what lets us know we’s gonna get there.”

Jo caught a ray of energy from the friends and brought them around with Amazing Grace. The players ran the strings forming skeleton and sinew for the song. The night air carried her sweet voice far from the fire. When she finished, folks just sat and thought. Then they “grabbed-up their hands and put them together,” as Boomer’s wife noted for the record.

In turn, each player shared a song or two and sang when the words were known; hummed when they weren’t. The music stirred the religious juices of the friends so well conditioned to sing to the Jesus God who filled them and to whom they had given over the power of their lives and the testaments of their souls.

“Your boys got Bibles?” The love-filled guitar picker asked.

“Well, ah … not with us, here right now,” Jo answered, somewhat surprised by the left field question.

“Then let the Gideons give ’em Bibles, he said. Obviously happy to be allowed to share what he prized so much. “Gideons is a group of men who give Bibles,” he went on to explain.

“I know of them, Jo answered.”

He laid his guitar in his wife’s lap and got up and went into his trailer. Back, he laid two small editions of the New Book out in his hand. “Let me write in them, for the boys,” he said, as he sat down again and opened the first book. “I’ll put my name in too, and our phone, so that if you come up our way into Kentucky, you can find us. It’s easy. Come up 75 to exit 59. We live close. The Maple Grove Church we play at is closer. Come, and we can play music if its a weekend.”

“I’d like that,” Jo answered his invitation which she knew to be as sincere and heartfelt as any she had ever had.

Boomer got into the invitation and added information about the exit, the area, and the proximity to the Renfro Valley which he described as Kentucky’s home of bluegrass and authentic country music.

“Did you know Old Joe Clark just died?”

“Same day as Grandpa Jones,” someone across the fire added.

“Them two was friends and I was a friend of Joe’s,” Boomer said sadly. He was uncomfortable with that and got up to fuss the fire. The wet cedar wouldn’t hold the flame. He uncapped the transmission fluid and poured the red oil onto the wood. The fire jumped at the chance to eat. Roiling black smoke followed the wind around the camp laying an oily residue on all who sat around the rim.

“Time to go,” the mandolin’s current owner announced in a voice hardly strong, but firm enough to get the job done. The smoke went straight up, and then danced around the circle and the service.

“Transmission fluid,” Boomer commented under his breath. “Here we’s talkin’ about going to Jesus and transmission fluid drives us off…”