Grand Change (6 page)

Late
Fall
and
Early Winter
on Hook
Road

Wally Mason and I made our musical debut at the Christmas
concert that year. The whole thing came about in the way peculiar to endeavours that have no real direction. The course of things began the previous summer, when a country music show came to town. The fiddler they had stacked up with the best. Segments of the show were aired over the local radio station. Wally Mason got inspired and dug an old fiddle and bow out from the attic.

They could have belonged to a grand-uncle, but nobody knew for sure. Neither was much to brag about—maybe fifteen hairs left in the bow, and they had to be knotted, there was such a wow in the shaft. The fingerboard had finger-worn patches and the strings—mostly of gut—were dirt-stiff and blackened. But it was sound enough to tune and Jim Mackie set it up and gave Wally a few basic lessons.

Joe Mason's farm was directly across from ours, with the same frontage running down to Tom Dougal's line. There was Joe and his wife, Mabel, his daughter, Jenny, and son, Wally, who was around my age and a little younger than his sister. Wally and I pretty much grew up together: played together, fought together, went to school together; he was the closest thing to a brother I would ever have.

I came into the Masons' yard one evening not long after Wally started into the music. Joe was standing by their porch door, short, bandy-legged and belligerent. He was thrusting his arm toward the barn with cants of his cannonball head, his word phrases coming in shots: “Get to the barn with that thing, go up loft, scare all the rats out of the granary they'll think twenty seven mad cats and a drunken piper is out to get them, and don't squawk that thing when the milk cows are around, they'll not let down their milk for a month.” Wally came out then, his long, skinny legs dragging his oversized feet in his waggling shuffle. There was a sulky scowl on his long, thin face, made sharper by a long, thin nose. Of course, he had “that thing” under his arm.

In any given evening after that, you could find Wally perched on a loft girder in the barn, sawing away, staring in concentration, his tongue lolling out and his jaw working to the dip and saw of the bow.

I'd sit on the girder and watch for a while. Eventually he'd pause, take a quick look at me and say, “Now tell me what this one is, Jake.” And he'd saw away with his eyes staring at me.

I'd make a few guesses when he'd finish and his eyes would go blank in their stare. Then he'd shake his head in disgust. “You don't have much of an ear for music if you can't even tell what that is, Jake,” he'd say. But one evening I caught the second half of “Saint Anne's Reel” over and over with Wally sitting smug-faced and his jaw clamped shut. He didn't have much time for me that night.

The next evening, I was sitting on a stone by Alban Gallant's door with his old, neck-sprung guitar, learning chords.

Alban's gateway was pretty much dead across from John Cobly's. His frontage, like John's, ran down to the Wallace's line, which was about two hundred yards from their farm buildings and the mill by the creek. Alban and his wife, Annette, had seven children, like the steps of stairs, and the whole family was musical. They were standard entertainment at the tymes and Alban accompanied Jim Mackie on guitar as well.

Alban was moving some pigs from pen to pen and he pretty
well taught me between pigs, leaning over me—with that pig smell from the odd patch of manure on his overalls—to place my fingers on the strings. I got the D, A and G chords down half decent by the time he got the pigs settled in. “Now practise them chords,” Alban said. “Over and over. Then practise changing from one to the other. Then start humming a tune while you strum and change chords. You got any ear at all, it'll tell you when it sounds right. Same with the fiddle. You want to tune to the fiddle, use this third string with the second one on the fiddle. Here you go. Keep the guitar long as you want. It's good enough to learn on. I got me a Gibson.” A slightly bemused look came into his round-set eyes and over his square, Acadian face with its jaw jut. “You hit the big time, I want your autograph,” he said.

A few evenings later, I showed up at Joe Mason's barn loft. Wally paused, eyeing me with the bow dead on the strings. Then he sawed a few notes looking at the straw; then he eyed me again, sideways, and lifted the bow. “Figured we could work her together,” I said. “Alban taught me.” I whistled “Home on the Range” and worked the chords.

“But that ain't ‘Saint Anne's Reel,' Jake.”

“Figured we could work that out between us.”

“You're going to tie me up and slow me down, Jake.”

“You're going to have to learn to play with a guitar sooner or later.”

Wally canted his head and studied the straw again.

It took a while to persuade him, but we finally got at it. We managed to get tuned and away in some kind of recognizable gnash. Probably nobody could call it music, except us, and that only by spells. But we sawed and flailed away, fought a few times, quit twice. But there's an element in learning that holds back the whole truth, at least there was in our case, and we worked away at it pretty much the rest of the summer. It's only proper to mention that Joe Mason never went near the barn on any given evening that summer for no good reason.

We eased off a bit during grain harvest and potato digging. Partly because of the work and partly because we had pretty much wore out our version of “Saint Anne's Reel.” We tried “Nelly Grey” and “Red Wing” and a few like that, but Wally didn't take to them all that good.

“They're not really tunes, Jake,” Wally said. “Anybody can play them; got to have a little class, too, you know.”

And we can handle all the class we can get,
I thought, but I kept that one to myself. We'd had a pretty good row the night before. By the time the cold began to pick up and we were spending most of our time blowing on our fingers, we decided to pack it in. I left the guitar at the Masons' hoping things would resume somehow, but after a couple of weeks with nothing happening, I decided I might as well go one evening and take it home.

Joe Mason gave me an owly look when I stepped inside the door. “He's in the attic,” he said. “Make sure you keep the door shut.”

Wally was playing by candlelight, perched on an old trunk with his back to the brick flue, which took most of the heavy off the cold. Around him, the hat racks, bedspring, broken desk, bottles and junk known to old attics cast their shadows on the wall and what bareness there was on the floor. He was sawing away on “The Barley Corn Reel,” a new tune I'd heard on the radio a few weeks back. He was clamp-jawed with that smug look again. He just glanced my way, then stared straight ahead and kept driving 'er. But he had my guitar leaning on an overturned orange crate, so I got set up and tried to flail in, but there was no way.

“Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. “How are you playing that? I can't follow you at all.”

Wally paused, peering down his nose at me with the bow horizontal on the strings. “That's how it was played on the radio; I picked it off the radio,” Wally said, smirking in his smugness.

“But I can't follow you.”

“There's more than three chords in this game, Jake. You want to play with me you'll have to learn them.”

“Let's go to Jim Mackie's some night and get him and Alban to iron things out for us?”

“There's always that possibility,” Wally said, sawing away again. Eventually, he paused, peered sideways at me, and smirked again. “Great to be smart, ain't it, Jake,” he said.

We didn't have to make any arrangements. Any evening Jim and Alban had nothing better to do, which was most of the time, they'd be at Jim's going over tunes.

We went on an evening just after the first early snow. There were smatterings of drifted snow on the road and our footsteps rattled on the frozen wheel ruts. The night was dead quiet with the gloom of a moonless, winter blackness that would augment at the bark of a distant dog.

Jim Mackie's farm was on the east side of the road, facing Dan Coulter's property. Both farms ran from the hollow down to the creek. We could hear the rhythmic gnash of fiddle-guitar music when we passed the woods of spruce on the crown of the hollow's north bank, and when we came around the wood house, just at the gate, we could see Jim's head weaving with the music and the jiggle and dip of his bow arm in the inverted V of the curtains of his kitchen window.

Jim's wife, Alice, and daughter, Shirley—both plump, black-haired and round faced, looking more like sisters—were playing forty-fives at the kitchen table. They answered in chorus to our knock above the music and greeted us between card slaps as we entered. The music stopped suddenly. Jim
and Alban nodded at us in greeting, then sat eying us
curiously.

“I hear you boys are into the music these days,” Jim Mackie said. “Let's see your stuff.” He held out his fiddle and bow to Wally.

Alban Gallant held out his guitar to me.

It took Wally a bit of anxious juggling—getting his mitts in his pocket, then his coat off, working the bow and fiddle from hand to hand—and me about the same with the guitar, but we finally got set and into “The Barley Corn Reel.” Jim Mackie quietly studied Wally while he played, his dark eyes peering from his square face, which was brightened by a fringe of steel-grey hair, and his stout arms folded across his chest.

“Sounds like ‘The Barley Corn Reel,'” Jim said when we stopped. “You're in the sharps and flats.”

“I learned it from the radio,” Wally said. He was holding Jim's fiddle and bow with some kind of reverence.

Jim took them and began sawing segments of the tune in that halt of learning until he paused with the bow on the strings and snap-canted his head.

“I'll be danged,” he said. “I've been trying to get that one down for weeks and you just gave me the gist of it in the right key. If you picked that off the radio, you've got an ear for music; I'll tell you that right now.”

“I want to be an Old Tyme Fiddle Champion,” Wally said. He was bending toward Jim with that reverence shining in his eyes.

“Think you'll make 'er, do you?” Jim Mackie said, his eyes in a thoughtful peer. “Well, you never know.” He went back to working the tune.

“And you don't know the chords,” Alban Gallant said, looking at me. I nodded. Alban took the guitar, his left hand taking position. “You use bar chords,” he said. He ran his left hand up the neck of the guitar, shifting his fingers and barring chords. He paused now and then, watching Jim, waiting for a chord turn in his fiddling. “A sharp,” Alban Gallant finally said, holding up his left index finger. “You use this finger instead of the nut—that's this white thing here at the end of the fingerboard. You use the other fingers to get the chord, like this…” He paused for a minute with his fingers on the strings, thinking. “Wait a minute; got any elastic?” he said to no one in particular.

“Take one of the wife's garters,” Jim Mackie said, without a pause.

“I use binder twine—all I can afford,” Alice said, slapping down the pack of cards. “Hearts are trump.”

“Enough to tie up a good-sized sheaf, too,” Jim said.

“And enough to hang you with,” Alice said. She lurched out of her chair then, slapping down her cards, and got a piece of white elastic from the radio shelf. She dropped it on Alban on her way back to sit down.

“Where did you get that?” Jim Mackie said.

“Never you mind.”

Alban Gallant took half a pencil from his pocket and constructed a crude capo by choking the guitar neck with the elastic and binding the tips of the pencil with it laying across the strings. “You make up one of these and put it where you get the right sound with the chords, you know, see?”

“Yeah, I do,” I said. I took the guitar and moved the capo up and down the strings, working my three chords, marvelling at how such a complicated thing could be made so simple.

“Time you learned a few more,” Alban said after watching me awhile. “Here.” He began placing my fingers on the strings. “This is C… This is F… You use them with G… Yeah, good. You learn quick.”

Jim Mackie had not paused in his pondering saw.

“He's into it,” Alice said, eyeing Jim and slapping down a card. “There'll be nothing but squeaks and squawks tonight. Once he starts a tune, he's gone.”

Jim paid Alice no heed.

Alban Gallant paused, watching Jim with a smirk on his face. “Well I guess I'll head home,” he said. He paused again, still looking at Jim. Finally, he took the guitar, deconstructed the capo, and put the guitar in a homemade canvas bag.

“Don't forget to give the elastic back to the wife,” Jim Mackie said, deadpan. “It might belong to her ‘unmentionables.'” He did not pause in his fiddling.

“I use binder twine for them, too,” Alice said.

“We'll be seeing youse,” Alban said, heading for the door.

Everybody responded but Jim.

“You boys may as well join us in a four-hander of Auction,” Alice said.