“Pastor, he took my stage trailer from my warehouse in Cullman and put it up for sale,” I said, and I said it into the silence under the oaks, where a hundred people stood frozen with their paper plates. “Nine weeks ago, I sold Tubb Sound and Stage for five million, nine hundred thousand dollars. Every trailer, every speaker, every employee.” The old pastor of Shady Grove, ninety years old and bent like a shepherd crook, leaned on his cane and listened. “Unit six is on line six of the equipment list. It belongs to the buyer. Caleb has also taken two speaker stacks and a soundboard.”
Wendell had gone the color of old paper. He held the page between his fingers, and it trembled. “Caleb,” he said hoarsely, “son, tell me this is a mistake.” Caleb stood at the microphone, in the white shirt he had worn to church for years, and could not speak. A hundred people watched his throat bob. “Daddy, I thought the company was fading,” he said at last. “Uncle Hollis told me the churches were all going to screens. I thought if I took one stage, I could start something.” “You started something, son,” I said. “You started a lie. I am not angry that you wanted a start. I am sad that you did not ask me.”
Darlene came across the grass in her Sunday dress, with her hand on the arm of her sister. She climbed the stage steps slowly and stood next to me. “Wendell,” she said, “for thirty five years you have called my husband the sound man at this very church. You asked him to sit with the audience. You asked him to run the cords. You never once asked him to sing.” She took the microphone from the stand. “Hollis Tubb has a voice like a river, and he has been silent for you.” Wendell closed his eyes. “Hollis,” he said, “I owe you a better name.”
A sheet of paper laid on a music stand gave one nephew the weekend to bring his uncle back to the churchyard in Hanceville.
I gave Caleb my terms in front of the whole congregation, with the old pastor beside me. The trailer, the two speaker stacks and the soundboard would be at my warehouse in Cullman by noon on Monday. Whitfield Sound and Stage would be closed, and the white letters scrubbed from the side. He would tell the lawyers of the buyer the whole truth. If he did all of it, I would not press charges, and I would ask the new owners to keep him on as a stage crew chief, because he could still set a full stage in a hayfield in ninety minutes.
On Monday morning, I stood in the gravel lot at my warehouse. The speaker stacks arrived first, in the back of a church van. The soundboard followed, wrapped in a quilt. At ten, the black thirty two foot trailer rolled up with Caleb driving the truck, his eyes swollen, and Bobby, my warehouse manager, climbed onto the tongue to check the unit number. He turned back to me. “Mr. Hollis, number six,” he said, grinning in spite of himself. “Hydraulics are fine. Roof is fine. It has all its lights.” I laid a palm on the black side, and I felt the whole trailer tick as it cooled.
Wendell came to see me that Wednesday night, alone, on my porch. He carried a Bible and a covered pie. He sat down on the porch rail and told me that he had not slept since Sunday, and that he had prayed in the empty church until the dew fell. He said he had spent his whole life leading singing and never once listened to the people holding the cords. “Hollis, the shaped note book says the tenor leads, but it is the bass that holds the song up,” he said. “I put you at the back and then complained when you were not at the front.” I told him I would sing on the first Sunday in June, if he would hold my place.
On the first Sunday in June, the all day singing was held again at Shady Grove. The churchyard filled by seven. Quartets from three states stood at the edge of the stage with their hats in their hands. Wendell stood in front of the crowd with the microphone and said, “Before we begin, I want to ask Hollis Tubb to come lead the first song.” I climbed onto that stage. I took the microphone. I stood in front of nine hundred people, and I opened my mouth, and sang “Farther Along” in a low, trembling bass that I had not used in public in forty years. Darlene wept in the third row. When I finished, nobody moved. Then the oaks themselves seemed to clap.
The money consequences were fair. Caleb repaid the buyer eleven thousand dollars for the moving costs and a cracked tail light, and he ran a stage crew for a year without overtime. Wendell sold a hay field to pay the legal fees of his son, and he sent me a check for the trouble. I carried it to the church treasurer. “Put it into the building fund,” I said. “The roof has needed fixing since 1998.” The treasurer, a woman of eighty, took it with both hands and said, “Brother Hollis, the roof will have your name under the shingles.” I told her I would prefer it under the eaves.
In the name of my father, Gus Tubb, who passed seventeen years ago and who ran a sound system for the quartets of Cullman County in a borrowed truck with a single microphone, I started the Quartet Fund. It buys speakers, microphones and a small sound system for small country churches in Alabama that cannot afford them. In the first year, we outfitted thirty one churches. At a wooden church in the hills, an elderly woman sang the first verse of “Amazing Grace” into a microphone for the first time in her life, and her voice, which had been whisper soft for years, filled the whole building.
The following June, at the all day singing at Shady Grove, I carried no cords at all. Wendell met me at the church steps. “Hollis,” he said, “I ran every wire this morning myself, and Caleb checked every one.” He handed me a paper cup of lemonade and walked me to the front row, where a folding chair waited with my name taped on the back. I sat among the singers. The quartet from Cullman took the stage, and when they reached the last chorus, I heard my own voice come up from my chest and join them. I was no longer fooling with wires. I was singing.
