Sour Notes, page 4
When we arrived at a park near the center of the city, we settled onto the grass and listened to music played on a giant stage. People danced in the crowd. Anna brought us wraps and drinks from a street vendor as we sat, mesmerized listening to real live stars. Not superstars, of course, but people who had cut an actual record. We had only listened to them in the back of Anna’s store, and now we were watching them in the flesh.
On the Friday and Saturday, the festival had run into the evening, but it closed at five o’clock on Sunday. When the festival ended, we were still buzzing from the excitement. Anna led us on an excursion through the downtown area. Loud music poured out of bars. People sat at tables on sidewalks in front of restaurants, eating fancy food and drinking wine and beer.
We walked up and down hills through the maze of twisting streets. Mesmerized by the crowds and the sights and sounds, I would never have found my way back to the car on my own.
We came upon a small open area with an eight-feet-tall sculpture at its center—an iron set on its heel like it was waiting to press the wrinkles out of a shirt. A man painted all in silver like a statue came alive to surprise tourists walking past. A magician impressed a small crowd with card tricks. He bantered with them, a string of cheesy jokes that made everyone laugh.
Sitting on a chair in the center of a sizable audience was a man playing a guitar. He was singing and cutting up with them as they tossed money into his guitar case. When we approached, he smiled and winked at Anna.
After he finished his set and bowed to appreciative applause, he crossed to us and hugged Anna. “Darling,” he crowed, “so glad you called. I haven’t seen you in ages.” He drew out his words comically.
“Charlie, you remember my son, don’t you?”
“No way he can be yours. You’re too young to have a kid this old!”
She blushed and pointed at me. “And this is Freddie, the young man I told you about.”
He bowed before me with theatrical exaggeration. “Always a pleasure to meet a fellow musician. Anna tells me you are fabulous.” With his loud emphasis on each syllable of that last word, he had the people milling about laughing.
I felt my face turn red.
He grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the chair and his waiting guitar. “Do you have a song prepared?”
“A what?”
“A song, honey. You’re about to be on stage.”
“No, wait. I can’t—”
He ignored my protests and clapped his hands for attention. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the world premiere of Freddie McDonald!”
“Dougal.”
He leaned over to hear me. “Huh?”
“McDougal. It’s McDougal.”
“It’s McMud if you don’t entertain them, so sit your butt down in that chair and play.”
I looked to Anna for help, but she was cheering along with everyone else. She knew me well enough to know that I would have refused to go to Asheville with her if I had known what she was planning. No way was I playing in front of strangers. Except now, I was stuck. My choice was to run or make some music. And if I ran, I didn’t know how to get home. I could never face Anna after chickening out, even if I found them again.
With my heart racing, I picked up his guitar, settled into the seat, and tried to think of what to play. My fingers fumbled over the strings, and sweat rolled down my forehead.
Charlie leaned over and whispered to me, “Just relax and have fun. The crowd wants to have a good time. As long as you give them that, you’re gold.”
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and began picking the strings, hesitantly at first. But then the music settled over me. The crowd faded from my mind. The notes slipped out. I was falling into the trance that let me play.
Chink.
I opened an eye, surprised to see a quarter rolling in Charlie’s guitar case. My first payment as a professional musician. I wished I’d saved it, but it blended with the money already there.
Inspired by the falling coin, the song floated through me. A couple danced on the sidewalk. A group of college kids swayed to the beat. A dollar bill floated out of a man’s hand and into the case. My spirits soared. I was playing guitar and getting paid for it.
When I finished the first song, the crowd applauded politely. Charlie whispered another song into my ear and asked if I knew it. I started picking the notes. To my surprise, his voice belted out, singing the lyrics as I played. The crowd roared its approval as he clowned with them. Money dribbled into the case.
Charlie grabbed Anna’s hand, and they danced on the sidewalk, singing along with my playing. Xander beat the percussion rhythm against a plastic bucket. A police officer stood on the sidewalk, tapping his toe, a smile on his face. I saw a five-dollar bill get added to the pot.
I was hooked and could have played all night. After the set, though, Charlie stopped simply by announcing that I would play one last song. I did. The crowd cheered, money got tossed, and another musician moved to the chair.
We perched on a ledge and listened. Charlie explained they shared the corner, mapping out a schedule of who played when. They also kept a watch over each other, protecting as needed and cheering successes. And, importantly, their constant playing kept others from poaching their prime spot. To my surprise, he gave me his phone number and invited me to come play with them. He introduced me around so that they knew I was a welcome part of the crew.
In those early days, my busking time was limited because I always needed a ride to get there. I couldn’t ask my parents. I didn’t want to tell Dean. Xander, when he could borrow the Camaro, came with me. A few times, I hitched rides. I saved every penny until I scraped together enough money to buy an ancient Honda Civic.
Dad hated that thing. I should have bought American, he said. And he asked where I’d gotten the money.
I couldn’t tell him, though. Not earning it in Asheville. Certainly not playing music for money. I knew without even saying it that he considered that begging. I couldn’t sully the McDougal name like that.
So I told him I’d earned it working for Anna. He looked unsure, but he never asked again. Maybe he just didn’t want to know.
But he was right about the car. It was a clunker. Fortunately, Dean helped me with it. He fixed it up so it wouldn’t break down going back and forth on Interstate 40, though Dean thought I was just driving it around Millerton, mostly to and from Xander’s. I tried to pay him, but he refused to take anything except for the price of the parts.
All I cared about was that I was playing music. Getting cheers from audiences. Getting paid for it all. And making friends who were as about music as I was.
7
When Xander and I put down our instruments and agreed to meet again the next day to jam, I left relaxed and ready to finally go home. It was early afternoon, hours after my intended arrival, when I made my way well outside of town and turned off the pavement onto the old familiar gravel road.
The Caldwell farm sat on the right. The McDougal land was to the left. Rows of corn stretched in either direction until they reached the foot of the mountains. Dust rose behind my vehicle, blocking the last remnants of modern civilization from view.
The few gravel roads I had been on in the last several years were rough and rutted, but not this one. It was smooth and maintained. Every other spring, we would drag this road to eliminate the washboard that formed over the winter and to add gravel to thin spots. In the opposite years, the Caldwells handled the task. The few families that lived farther up in the mountains never helped. We had the equipment, and they didn’t. Simple enough.
Is it the Caldwells’ year? If Dad was so sick, he couldn’t have been able to operate a box blade on a tractor. But he couldn’t have planted the acres of corn either. Did they hire someone to help? Hiring seasonal help was one thing. We’d done it out of necessity at certain times of year, but someone had to be out in the fields every day.
The tires crossed from the gravel to the old wooden bridge over the creek Dean and I had played in as kids. The hum of the tires over the boards changed back to the crunch of gravel, the sign to look for the mailbox marking the entrance to our home. With sweaty palms and a churning in my stomach, I turned the SUV into the narrow passage through the corn that was our driveway. The roof of the house peeked over the stalks.
With a suddenness that took my breath away—the same as it had when I was a child—the corn opened to reveal the small yard surrounding our house. The massive maple tree in the front yard stood sentry as it had for a century. The old barn rose behind the house.
The house itself sat in the center of the clearing. Its covered front porch stretched from one corner of the house to the other. It looked the same as it always had. I suspected the interior was also the same.
Three windows on the second floor above the porch marked my bedroom on one side, Dean’s on the other, and the small bathroom we shared in between. Our great-grandfather had added it a hundred years earlier when indoor plumbing became a reality.
If we snuck in or out of the house at night, we didn’t dare use the steps in the house’s interior. Our parents’ bedroom was in the rear of the second floor, and they would always hear us coming or going. Instead, we would use our windows, cross the porch roof, and drop to the ground. To return, we climbed the porch supports.
Downstairs, the front parlor was under Dean’s room. The dining room was below mine. The front door in between stood open to let the mountain breezes slip through the screen. The rear parlor, which had been converted to the farm office, and kitchen were toward the back of the house.
I could see every inch clearly in my mind—every piece of furniture, the scuff marks we had left on the floor, and even the colors in each room. I suspected they looked the same as they had the day I’d left.
Somewhere inside, my father lay dying. My mother, I had no doubt, stood in those shadows and watched me through one of the open windows. She would have heard me coming down the gravel from a mile away. We’d always known when a visitor was arriving.
I took a deep breath. After all these years, I was home.
After parking in the shade of the sprawling maple tree, I waited to see if she would emerge. When she didn’t, I got out and looked around, not wanting to rush inside.
My original impression that nothing had changed was wrong. The longer I stared, the more I noticed. The barn, always neat and orderly in my youth, sagged to one side. No interior lights blazed, so the propped-open door revealed only gloomy shadows. From what little I could see, no bales of hay were stacked inside.
A tractor was parked just in front of the barn in its usual spot beside a row of implements. Rather than looking oiled and fit, the equipment was faded, and rust spots were apparent. Tall grass grew through the openings, a sure sign nothing had moved this spring. One front tire was half-deflated, a sin that would never have been allowed in my youth.
The garden between the house and barn was half-planted. Overgrown weeds strangled what young plants had emerged. Broken branches lay scattered under the tree. One of my daily chores had been to pick up and dispose of any debris on the lawn.
Only a scar in the bark of the thick branch above my head remained to mark where the tire swing had once hung. I’d loved sitting in that tire with a book in my hand, reading away my summer days. Dean had preferred seeing how high he could swing then leaping from the tire at its peak.
The flower beds surrounding the front steps contained early-spring blooms, but weeds had erupted around them. Mom loved those beds and wanted them perfect. While Dean toiled away in the fields, I’d spent many a day on hands and knees, pulling unwanted growth until my sneezing drove me indoors.
The house needed a fresh coat of paint. A shutter hung from a second-floor window. A gutter had pulled loose from one corner.
All the maintenance work of the house, in addition to running the farm, would have fallen on Dad’s shoulders with both Dean and me gone. In my haste to escape, I’d never thought much about how he would manage alone. He had done it before we came, but he was younger then.
That made me wonder again how the fields surrounding the house were so well maintained. Had they hired someone to run the farm? But wouldn’t they use the barn and tractor? Maybe a neighboring farmer was leasing the land.
The squeak of the screen door interrupted my thoughts. My mother stepped onto the broad porch and let the door slam closed behind her. She wiped her hands on her apron and stood staring at me.
Her hair was grayer. Wrinkles crisscrossed her face. Age spots dotted the backs of her hands. She looked older than her years, but farming life was hard.
Our sporadic phone calls may have let us hear voices, but we hadn’t seen each other since I’d left. She was sizing me up the same way I was her. The years had changed me too.
My hair might have been too shaggy when I left—a constant battle with the old man about the need to keep it cut—but now it reached well past my shoulders.
The sweatshirt mercifully hid most of my tattoos, but the ink was visible on the backs of my hands. The tattoos Dean and I got on our eighteenth birthdays—a day apart, of course—had caused a massive fight in the house. Why would we want to deface our bodies? My transgression had since gone far beyond that first innocent treble clef inked on my calf.
While we were growing up, Mom hated to see us wear black T-shirts with our jeans. “You look like hoodlums,” she would scold. Now I stood in front of her with a black sweatshirt, jeans, and boots, wearing her hated color from head to toe.
With a deep breath, I crossed the yard and climbed the steps like a little boy going to Mommy for his punishment. I braced for a scolding. A tense conversation. Even just a soft tsking.
But she did the last thing I expected. She wrapped her arms around me, pulled me close in a bear hug, and cried.
8
We sat in the rocking chairs on the front porch. The table between us held a tray of sandwiches and a pitcher of sweet iced tea. My protests that I needed nothing had been ignored, and I was thankful. The scant food I had eaten on the red-eye flight the night before had long stopped satisfying my hunger.
We rocked in silence and watched a hawk soar through the air, floating on the thermals and hunting for its next meal. It circled then dove with astounding speed, disappearing behind the corn for a few seconds. It reemerged with a vole wriggling in its claws.
The corn. Rows and rows of healthy corn. I had to broach the subject. “Who’s running the farm?”
Mom’s chair squeaked. “Russ Caldwell.”
“Russ? Not his daddy?”
“Vern died a few years back. Heart attack out in the field. They didn’t find him until he didn’t show up for supper.”
“That’s awful.”
“It’s the way your daddy always wanted to go. Better than this.”
I couldn’t deny that, but I wasn’t ready for that conversation. I avoided it. “And Russ has the time to tend your fields too?”
“He’s done well. Grown his business enough to hire a couple of fellows full-time.”
I could sense she had more to say as she rocked back and forth, but I knew better than to rush it. When we were in trouble for some transgression and waiting for the punishment, Dean and I joked that we knew the seriousness of a conversation based on how long it took to get there. Her rocking told me I wouldn’t like the answer. My patience was rewarded when she dropped the bomb. “It’s not our fields. It’s his.”
That news took a few minutes to process. This land had belonged to McDougals since old Hobard crossed into the valley. I never had the affinity for it, but I’d never imagined it ever being in anyone else’s hands.
She answered the question I couldn’t bring myself to ask. “When your daddy got sick, we knew we couldn’t handle the farm anymore. Russ offered us a fair price so we could pay off the mortgage, cover his doctor bills, and still have a little left over.”
“And the house? Did he buy it too?”
“House goes with the land, but the deal is I get to stay in the house until… well, until I don’t need it no more. We did it all legal. Had the lawyer put it in the papers.”
Dad would have made sure she was protected. He’d loved the phrase trust but verify ever since he heard Reagan utter those words.
We rocked some more, giving me time to think. In city life, people had to pounce to stay in a conversation. I’d forgotten how long a discussion could take out here. “I’m just surprised.”
“Shouldn’t be. What else were we going to do with it? With Dean gone, no one was left to run it.” She grabbed my wrist. “And don’t pretend you wanted it. You never did.”
“It’s not like I hated it.”
She tsked. “I didn’t say that, but you weren’t a farmer. Never wanted to be.”
I wanted to protest because it felt like an accusation, not a statement. Still, she was right. I didn’t know what I would have done with the land if I’d inherited it. When times were tight, farmers borrowed against the land to stay afloat, so it wouldn’t have been unencumbered. I would probably have lost it to the bank trying to keep up with payments.
“Besides,” she continued, “this way, it stays a farm, not some housing development or mobile home park.”
We rocked and listened to the songbirds. “That had to break Dad’s heart. He loved the farm more than anything.”
She stopped her chair and turned to look at me. “Not more than you boys.”
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “He loved Dean.”
“He loved you both. Only difference is he saw Dean taking over this place. We both knew you were leaving.”
“I had to.”
She clucked under her breath. “I know.”
We sat side by side as time ticked by the way it always did in the country—slowly. I listened to the sound of the rustling corn, the creaking tree branches, and the calling birds. Once the kitchen was cleaned each night, she spent the rest of the evening out here relaxing. She’d never been one for TV. “So you’ll be okay living in this big house by yourself?”
