JUNE–JULY 1972
June in West Virginia is a cruel month to subdue any child, but it is unusually cruel to subdue him with piano practice and lessons. I had seen the effect of my playing on my mother’s depression. I was like David to King Saul, soothing the demons with my music. Under her tutelage, I had progressed and was ready for another level. I promised if she found a different teacher, I would apply myself to anything the G. Schirmer publishing company could come up with and practice on my grandmother’s out-of-tune Baldwin. From Beethoven to Mozart I would learn the classics, though I was more interested in playing Elton John.
Enter stage right Mrs. Clara Ann McCormick. She taught sixth grade at Dogwood Elementary and gave piano lessons to students of varying abilities. She was a short, stocky woman with hair much darker than her age and skin under her arms that nearly hung to the piano bench. She looked at the world through pin-size pupils and cat-eye glasses. Their edges turned up and had a fascinating silver design.
Mrs. McCormick talked and laughed with a raspy cackle like she had a perpetual frog in her throat, and she would clear it every few seconds, half in a cough and half in a clearing sound that made you think she needed an open window. It was unnerving to be in the middle of some complicated piece she was trying to teach and hear that “uh-hmm-hmm” sound. We settled on Wednesday afternoons and kept the weekly regimen into the school year. I was expected to practice an hour each day and be prepared for my lessons.
“These are the hands of a surgeon,” she said the first time I met her. She held up my palms and studied them as if she were a psychic reading the rivers and tributaries of my life. I think she was just glad to have a student whose fingernails were somewhat trimmed and weren’t black underneath.
My mother had dropped me at her home near the high school and we sat in the woman’s living room, a sparsely decorated apartment on the second floor of a small, four-apartment building. She owned an upright Kimball that filled the room with a rich sound, but the keys were heavy and you had to really mean it when you played. I wondered about the apartments beside and beneath hers—I hoped they were occupied by older people with hearing problems.
Mrs. McCormick was not the warmest person on the planet. Her life was sketchy—a husband and children who were on the wall over the piano but never present. Why did she live alone? Where were her children? Music was her only connection with the world, it seemed. When she played, she got lost, closing her eyes as if some internal conductor were working her hands to bring forth the songs.
“Let’s see what you can do,” she said. “Play something.”
I chose “The Spinning Song,” one of my father’s favorites because it was happy and jaunty. I played the piece, not flawlessly, but with only minor mistakes. Mrs. McCormick watched me and then put a simple song in front of me. I tried to play but struggled through. She removed it and crossed her arms.
“Matt, we need to come to an understanding. Your mother has hired me to teach you. But you have to want this. Why do you want to play?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not a good answer. Try again.”
There were a thousand reasons to learn music. There were a thousand ways a life was enriched—that’s what my mother had said. I could think of only one and it slipped out.
“It helps her,” I said.
“It helps who?”
“My mother. My playing makes her feel better, I think.”
“You’ve watched her play and mimicked her.”
I nodded. “I’ve never seen any use in reading the notes if I can play them by hearing them.”
She looked at me with a mixture of fascination and concern. Then she pulled a silver flask out of a suitcase-size purse and took a quick nip. “Well, I’ve never had a student like you. But if what your mother says is true about your acting ability, and how you can mimic others and remember dialogue, it only makes sense the good Lord made you this way for a reason.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, hearing for the first time that my mother thought I had a talent for acting and remembering things.
“Helping your mother with whatever she’s going through is laudable. I think she probably knows you don’t read the notes. But I’m going to take on faith that you’ll at some point come to the end of your ability to remember and repeat. One day you’ll connect what your hands are doing and what’s on the page. In other words, I’ll teach your fingers and ears first and then your eyes. We’ll go from your heart to your head rather than the other way around. Does that make sense?”
I nodded.
“At some point the music will have to be more for you than her. You can’t learn and make it part of you when you’re doing it only for someone else. This is about you, Matt.”
I smiled, not really understanding, and stepped away from the piano while she played “Für Elise,” a Beethoven piece about a girl he must have loved. I couldn’t help but think of Jesse as she played the melody.
Music has a way of burrowing into your soul. As much as I wanted to play modern songs, old Ludwig did his work. The song was in A minor, and he had evidently gone through ups and downs in the relationship because one part was sad and the next was cheery, but it quickly turned again and sounded like his team had lost a doubleheader. Or maybe an arm on the train tracks. Or maybe Elise loved somebody else.
About two minutes in, the piece rose in intensity and Mrs. McCormick sat forward and focused her gaze on the page, her loose skin dangling and jiggling. The song, from its beginning to its flourishing end, was a story, the ebb and flow of life. I did not know if Beethoven had ever moved from Pittsburgh to Dogwood, or if his family had problems, but without any lyrics, he had captured my feelings about falling for an Appalachian girl.
“Now you try,” she said.
We went through the first page that day and she taught me more about hand position and feeling the song than my mother ever communicated. Music, according to Mrs. McCormick, was not something performed as much as it was experienced. You didn’t play a song, you breathed it and interpreted it, sifting and enhancing it through everything you saw and heard and loved. Despite the acrid, pungent aroma of her breath, the afternoon invigorated me.
“Practice, practice, practice,” she said when my mother arrived. She put the music book with “Für Elise” under my arm and winked.
There followed days of roaming the hills and riding bikes and fishing with Dickie and Jesse, though Jesse often broke away early. Her mother wasn’t in the best of health and Jesse fetched groceries and medicine and bought packs of Pall Malls from a vending machine inside the only pool hall in town, which my parents strictly forbade me to enter.
“Only the lowest kinds of people go to a place like that,” my mother said one day as we passed it. It looked dark inside and I imagined all sorts of illicit behavior, but Jesse and Dickie laughed when I revealed this.
“You preacher boys sure have it rough,” Jesse said.
I heard my parents speaking in hushed tones early in the morning at the kitchen table. Ben was something we never talked about as a family. We talked freely of others’ problems but never our own. But here they spoke of him and of his dropping out of school and, worse than that, taking up with a girlfriend who “wasn’t good for him.” He and Cindy were living together, and their travels had led to an even bigger source of family shame. There were also hints that things weren’t going well at the church and that Old Man Blackwood was causing problems. Maybe it was the size of my ears, but I was always able to take in their conversations. When their words turned to me and they spoke of Jesse and Dickie, I heard sighs as if my friends were problems to solve. One morning they lowered their voices so far that I caught only bits and pieces.
“. . . should do it for him . . . ,” my father said.
“. . . don’t want to encourage . . . ,” my mother said.
“But if we think of him . . .”
I nearly crept into the hallway to hear but stayed in my bed until my grandmother called me to breakfast.
“How would you like to spend your birthday?” my mother said about a week before the big day as we drove to Huntington. She needed to pick up some sheet music from the Kenny Music Company.
“With Ben,” I said. The look on her face made me regret saying it. “I don’t know.”
“You have no idea?”
I shook my head as she parallel parked on Third Avenue. As a child born in the summer, I was not accustomed to a fuss like my brethren who had birthdays during the school year. There were always cupcakes or popsicles celebrating classmates when I was in elementary school. As I entered junior high, there were parties at pizza parlors or the local pool. My birthday was always a muted family affair, but without Ben, it would be even less celebratory.
I browsed through the store, looking at music books and trying to come up with an answer. My mother bought several pieces of sheet music for her ensemble at church and we ate at Dwight’s. I ordered a burger and fries and we talked.
Just as I took a big bite of coleslaw, a signature of the restaurant, my mother said, “What if we invited Dickie for the party?”
I stopped chewing. “Are you serious?”
“Matt, don’t talk with your mouth full.”
I swallowed. “Could Jesse come too?”
“I think Jesse might complicate things.”
“Why?”
“It’s just that . . .”
“Why do you hate her?”
“I don’t hate her. I’m concerned about the kind of influence she’s having.”
“Then why are you saying Dickie is okay?”
She sipped some iced tea and sat back. “I thought it might mean something to you to have him.”
“What about Dad?” I said.
“We can invite him, too.” She smiled.
“No, I mean what does he say about it?”
“He’s fine with Dickie.”
“Could we ask him about Jesse?”
“Let’s just make this a boys’ birthday invite, okay?”
I finished my meal and we rode home, the conflict rising inside me about how to invite only one of my friends. We listened to Paul Harvey on the way. Every day at noon Mom heard his take on the news. She was tired of the normal war reporting and the country’s unrest. She was tired of the constant negative coverage of the election and her beloved president. She would hit the Off switch on the TV each evening and say to Walter Cronkite, “No, that’s the way you say it is.”
Dickie immediately agreed to attend, but when he asked about Jesse, I told him it was a “boys only” party. He looked confused.
“This is not my idea, it’s my parents’. They only want you.”
He shook his head. “First time for everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“Most people around here don’t want me close to anything they’re doing. But I got to say, it feels kind of mean not to let her come.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And I don’t want to go and try to keep it a secret. Even if it does cost me some cake.”
“What if we tell her? What if we tell her to come by that day and when she shows up, we invite her inside? My parents will have to let her stay.”
Dickie shrugged. “She’s going to know she wasn’t invited, though. You going to tell her the truth?”
“If we tell her my parents don’t want her there, she’ll never come. She’ll boycott the whole thing. You know how she is.”
“Yeah.”
We thought about it, sitting there in Dickie’s garage, flies swarming at a trash can in the corner. It seemed an impossible situation.
“Why don’t you talk with your dad?” Dickie said.
I found my father alone at the church, studying. I knocked lightly on the door and he took off his glasses.
“I have a problem,” I said.
He sat back. “All right.”
I explained the whole thing in a long, rambling sentence that captured the situation as best I could.
“You’re between a rock and a hard place.”
“I just want Jesse to be there, Dad. And you’re the only one who can convince Mom.”
He scratched his chin and stared at the open Bible and his three-by-five cards. “Go ahead and invite her. I’ll explain to your mother.”
I didn’t hesitate, didn’t ask if he really meant it, just jumped up and ran to the door.
“Don’t say anything to your mother between now and then, okay?”
I rode to Dickie’s and gave him the good news. Then we rode to Jesse’s house together.
“Do you have to wear something special?” she said after I told her she was invited.
“No, we’re going to spit watermelon seeds and throw water balloons,” I said. “Wear what you normally wear.”
“Well, I got to bring a present, don’t I?”
“No, that’s the other thing. Nobody brings presents. Everything will be provided.”
She looked relieved. “All right then. I guess I’ll come.”
On the appointed day, my mother drove to Huntington and bought a dozen Stewarts hot dogs. She got enough vanilla ice cream from Dairy Queen to feed the town. Jesse and Dickie were standing with me in the kitchen when she returned, and Daisy Grace was clinging to Jesse’s leg like a tick. My grandmother looked like she wanted out of her own house.
My mother took one look at Jesse, then glanced at my father. She was clearly taken aback, but she covered well and collected herself. I guessed he hadn’t told her of the plan and there were whispers in the pantry, so I took my friends to the backyard and we unwrapped our hot dogs from the paper napkins and ate.
Dickie and Jesse said it was the first time they’d ever had a Stewarts hot dog and they couldn’t get over the sweetness of the root beer. We ate watermelon, spitting seeds from the top of the picnic table over the clothesline into the horseshoe pit. Dickie, it turned out, had the most air in his lungs and won the competition, though my father came in a respectable second. My uncle Willy and aunt Zenith made a cameo appearance and we took some pictures of all of us. We tossed horseshoes and played badminton. Closer to dark, after ice cream and sheet cake, my father handed me an envelope. Dickie and Jesse looked a little self-conscious that they didn’t have presents.
“You’ve gone through a big change moving here,” my dad said, “and I’m hoping this will help ease some of the pain.”
I opened it quickly and pulled out eight tickets with the Cincinnati Reds logo on them. July 12 and 13, Reds vs. Pirates. I gave him a hug, then pulled back.
“Wait, why are there four tickets to each game?” I said.
My mother smiled, but it looked more like a grimace, and she nodded for my father to explain.
“There’s one for you, one for me, and two for any friends you want to take along.”
I stared at him, not comprehending. Then I looked at Dickie and Jesse. Their faces lit like Christmas trees. They looked like they had just won a thousand dollars on Let’s Go to the Races.
“We’ll go early Wednesday morning,” my father said. “Gerald will handle the prayer meeting and Bible study. Thursday is an early game, so we’ll come back late afternoon. I spoke with your mother, Dickie. She said it would be all right. Jesse, I haven’t been able to reach your mother.”
My mother’s face showed a pain that looked almost like betrayal.
Jesse studied the ground and pulled Daisy close. “She’s feeling poorly and we don’t have a phone.”
“We’ll work it out,” my father said. “I’ve made reservations at a hotel in Covington, Kentucky. We’ll get two rooms—”
“Two?” my mother said.
“One for the women and one for the men—and then walk over the bridge to the game.”
“You’re staying in a real hotel?” Jesse said.
“Do you think your mom will let you?” I said.
“It might be a problem.”
“We’ll talk with her and explain,” my father said. “It would mean a lot to Matt to have you two there watching the Reds get beat.”
My mother quickly walked inside, apparently remembering something in the kitchen.
“Yeah, and you should bring your glove,” I said, smiling. “My dad caught a foul ball once at a Pirates game. There are lots of pop-ups that come into the stands.”
“You don’t have to throw them back?” Jesse said. “That can’t be true.”
“It is, you’ll see.”
Later that night my mom came into my room while I was reading Harper Lee. Jem and Dill were trying to get Boo Radley to come out. Jesse and Dickie were not only slow readers, they were slow listeners. I had abandoned trying to read to them because they stopped me to ask questions so much and sometimes I didn’t know the answers. So I read on without them.
“Were you surprised at your present?” my mother said.
I smiled. “Dad mentioned the game a few weeks ago, but I can’t believe Jesse and Dickie are coming.”
“Mm-hm. I can hardly believe it myself.” She said it with a mix of irony and disdain.
“This is the best birthday ever,” I said, trying to cheer her. I gave her a kiss but she walked out of the room looking weary.
Jesse returned early the next morning and knocked on our door. My grandmother peeked through the curtains and shook her head. “I told you, those Woods are like stray cats.”
I walked outside and sat by her on the porch, where we watched Daisy Grace pull dandelions and blow on them in the yard. Jesse had a hangdog look.
“I can’t go with you.”
“Why not?”
She jerked her head toward Daisy. “Plus, I got chores.”
“But it’s just one night. Dickie and I can do your chores when we get back. And if your mom can’t watch her, we could find somebody.”
“There ain’t nobody else to trust.”
“Don’t you have cousins who—?”
Her face flashed fire. “No way. It’ll be a cold day in—” She caught herself. “It’s just that Daisy can’t be around them people.”
It was ironic that Jesse’s family felt the same about their cousins as my parents felt about Jesse.
“Maybe if we take Daisy Grace with us, I could go,” Jesse said in a soft voice.
“You think?” That hadn’t crossed my mind, and I wondered whether my mother would consider it. Our car had room for six, but it would be tight.
“Let me ask,” I said.
I ran in the house and my grandmother complained about the noise. I found my mother in the backyard hanging laundry. She held clothespins in her mouth, working with unwieldy sheets, the dew from the clover staining her house shoes. I tried to explain the plan and cultivate sympathy for Jesse.
She held the sheet and pins, squinting into the sun just peeking over the hill. “What’s going on with her mother? That doesn’t make sense. That she would let that little girl tag along with us.”
“She’s not feeling well. Please, Mom? Daisy’s not a problem.” I said it convincingly, but I knew Daisy had a heart that was prone to wander. And if she caught sight of the pool, she would probably never want to leave the hotel.
My mother looked at me like I’d tried to play “Clair de Lune” with my feet. “Matt, I can barely handle the load I have. I can’t take on Daisy Grace. And that Jesse’s mother would suggest it . . .”
“I don’t know that she suggested it. It’s just an idea. There’s got to be a way. Maybe Mawmaw . . .” The words escaped my lips before I realized their futility.
My mother frowned. “Let me call your father.”
She went into the house and I walked to the front yard. Jesse was looking up at the hickory nut tree, where a squirrel flitted from limb to limb, swishing its tail. Daisy Grace was at the bottom of the walk going round and round the lamppost, her hand turning black from the fading paint.
“That party was fun,” Jesse said. “That was my first one.”
“Seriously?”
“Other than at school when they bring cupcakes. Daisy Grace loved those hot dogs and that root beer. She wasn’t whining about being hungry when she went to bed. Full as a tick. Just went right to sleep like nobody’s business.”
I hadn’t heard Daisy Grace say more than a handful of words since I’d met her, even when, in the last week, she’d accompanied us on all our bike rides and fishing.
My mother came out, shutting the screen door gently behind her. She smiled at Jesse and sat, watching Daisy Grace. “She’s got a lot of energy, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, ma’am. But she wears out real good when you give her enough leash to run.” Jesse’s hair was shining in the morning sun. She wore the same cutoff jeans every day and a T-shirt that was a size too big. Her feet were dark from walking barefoot, and she pulled at some clover by the porch as she spoke to my mother. “We was talking last night walking home and saying that you all have the nicest family.”
“Why, thank you, Jesse,” my mother said. “That’s kind of you.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true. We sure appreciated the party and the food and the invitation to the ballgame.”
“We were glad you could come. And about the game,” my mother said, lowering her voice. “I don’t think we can take Daisy with us. I’m really sorry.”
“I understand, ma’am. She’s a handful. Especially in a long car ride. One time we took her up to Charleston and I had to sit in the back with her and she squirmed and kicked the whole way. She slept coming home and I was glad of that. But she can wear a body out.”
“That was the first birthday party Jesse’s ever been to,” I said, playing the sympathy card as if it were the Rook.
My mother ignored me. “Does your mama need help? I’m head of the women’s group at church, and we’re setting up a list of people who can provide meals. Would that be something she’d say yes to?”
“We don’t go to your church, ma’am.”
“I understand. We just want to bless people in the community who are . . . going through a rough patch.”
“I appreciate your concern, Mrs. Plumley, I truly do,” Jesse said, standing. “But we’re fine.”
She walked to the hickory nut tree and picked up her bike lying in the shade. My mother looked at me with concern.
“Daisy Grace, come on, we got to get home.”
“Would you like some cake for your mom?” my mother said. “We’ve got plenty left over.”
Daisy Grace skipped toward Jesse singing, “Cake” with every step.
“You hold on and I’ll get you some,” my mother said.
She disappeared into the house, the screen door banging twice behind her as the hydraulic hinge took over. Jesse lifted her sister onto the back of her bike.
“I wish you could come,” I said. “Won’t be the same with just Dickie and me.”
“I reckon there’ll be another chance down the road,” she said, but I didn’t believe her.
“There’s a pool at the hotel. We were going to get there early and swim.”
As soon as it was out of my mouth, I regretted saying it because Jesse’s face fell.
“I don’t have a bathing suit anyway,” she said. “My mama took us to Rock Lake once. I ain’t never seen so much water. There was these spray things at the front you had to go through. I think they wanted to hose us down before we jumped in. But I squealed going through that cold water.”
From the sound of her voice, Rock Lake was a good memory.
My mother returned with a green Tupperware container filled to the brim with cake, frosting oozing. She put it in the front basket of the bike.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Jesse said, digging a hand into her pocket. She pulled out three dollars and handed them to me. “Mama’s check came. This is what I owe you for the bike.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that, Jesse,” my mother said before I could.
“No, ma’am, I do. I promised I’d pay him back. And if you can’t keep a promise, what can you keep?”
My mother and I watched them ride away. Then she put an arm around my shoulder. I think she wanted to say something but couldn’t.