Welding with Children (10 page)

Claude gathered his tuning kit, drank coffee with his wife, then headed out into the country in his little white van. He made a dozen turns and got on the clamshell road that ran by Michelle Placervent's unpainted house, a squared-off antique thing set high up on crumbling brick pillars. Behind the house were gray-wood outbuildings, and behind those the sugarcane grew taller than a man and spread for miles, level as a giant's lawn.

As he pulled his tool kit out of the van, Claude recalled that Michelle was the end of the line for the Placervents, Creole planters who always had just enough money and influence to make themselves disliked in a poor community. Her mother had died ten years before, after Michelle had graduated with a music degree and come home to take care of her. He looked up on the gallery, stopping a moment to remember her father, a pale, overweight man with oiled hair, who would sit in a rocker and yell after cars speeding in the dusty road, as though he could control the world with a mean word.

The piano tuner remembered that Mr. Placervent had begun to step up his drinking after his wife died, and Michelle had to tend him like a baby until he dropped dead in the yard yelling at a postman about receiving too many advertisements from Kmart. From that point on, it was just her, the black housekeeper, the home place, and a thousand acres the bank managed for her. Then the housekeeper died.

It had been a year since she had called him for a tuning. He stopped under a crepe myrtle growing by the porch, noticing that the yard hadn't been cut in a month and the spears of grass were turning to seed. The porch was sagging into a long frown, and the twelve steps that led to it bounced like a trampoline as he went up. He knocked and Michelle turned the knob and backed away, waving him in with a faint hand motion and a small smile, the way Placervents had been doing for two hundred years to people not as good as they were, but Claude didn't hold it against her, because he knew how she had been raised. Michelle reminded him of one of those pastries inside the display case down at Dufresne's Bakery—pretty, but when you tried to handle them, they fell apart, and your fingers went through to the goo inside. She was bouncing on the balls of her feet, as if she expected she might float off at any minute. He saw that she'd put on a few pounds and wasn't carrying her shoulders well, but also that there was still a kind of graceful and old-timey shape to her hips and breasts. Her hair was dark and curly, and her eyes were the brown of worn sharps on an old upright. A man could take an interest in her as long as he didn't look in those eyes, the piano tuner thought. He glanced around the house and saw that it was falling apart.

“I'm glad you could come so soon,” she said. “C above middle C is stuck.” She pointed over to an ornate walnut-cased vertigrand, and he remembered its rusty harp and dull, hymning soundboard. It would take three hours to get it regulated and pulled back up to pitch. He saw an antique plush chair, faded, with the imprint of her seat in its velvet, and he knew she would sit there until he was finished. Claude usually talked while he did regulations, so he chatted as he unscrewed the fall board, pulled off the front, and flopped back the lid. After a little while, he found an oval pill wedged between two keys and fished it out with a string mute. When she saw what it was, she blushed.

“This one of yours?” he asked, putting it on a side table.

Her eyes followed his hand. “You remember Chlotilde?”

He nodded. “She sure could cook, I heard.”

“She called it a ‘happy pill.' She told me that if things got too much for me to handle, I could take it.” She glanced up as though she'd told a secret by accident, and her eyes grew round. “I never took it, because it's the only one.”

Claude stole a look at her where she sat in front of the buckled plaster wall and its yellowed photographs of dead Placervents. It occurred to him that Michelle had never done anything, never worked except at maintaining her helpless mother and snarling old man. He remembered seeing her in town, always in stores, sometimes looking half-dead and pale, sometimes talking a mile a minute as she bought food, medicines for the aged, adult diapers, coming in quick, going out the same way, enveloped in a cloud of jasmine perfume.

“You know,” he said, “you could probably go to a doctor and get another pill or two.”

She waved him off with two fingers. “I can't stand to go to doctors. Their waiting rooms make me want to pass out.”

“There,” he said, running a trill on the freed ivory. “One problem solved already.”

“It's good to get rid of at least one,” she said, folding her hands in her lap and leaning forward from the waist.

“What problems you having, Michelle?” He put a tuning hammer onto a pin and struck a fork for A. His tuning machine was being repaired at the factory, so he'd gone back to listening, setting temperament by ear.

“Why, none at all,” she said too brightly and breathlessly. Claude thought she spoke like an actress in a 1940s movie, an artificial flower like Loretta Young who couldn't fish a pill from between two piano keys to save her soul.

He struck the butt of the fork on the upturned lid and tuned A 440, then the A's above and below that, and set perfect reference notes in between, tuning by fifths and flatting strings until the sounds in the steel wires matched the sounds in his head. He then tuned by octaves from the reference notes, and this took over an hour. Michelle sat there with her pale hands in her lap, as though she had bought a ticket to watch. The piano's hammers were hard, so he gave them a quick grind with his Moto-Tool, then massaged the dampers, which were starting to buzz when they fell against the strings. He went over the tuning pins again. “I don't know if this job will hold perfect pitch, Michelle, but if a note or two falls back, give me a call and I'll swing by.”

She nodded. “Whenever you're out this way, you can stop in. If something's wrong with the piano, I'll be glad to pay to get it fixed.” She smiled a little too widely, like someone desperate to have company, which the tuner guessed she was. He sat down to play a little tune he tested instruments with, but then stopped after half a minute.

What the tuner remembered was that he'd never heard Michelle play. Judging from the wear on the hammers, she must have practiced all the time, so he asked her. She stood, fluffed her skirt, and walked over with a goosey step. Claude expected she might wring the notes out more or less in time, the way most players do, but after about ten measures of “As Time Goes By,” he could hear that she had a great natural touch, making old George lay the hammers against the strings like big felt teardrops, building note words that belled out into the room. The piano tuner was moved by what she was doing with his work. Next, she surprised him by playing something that sounded like Mozart. Claude had hung around kiddie recitals enough to know a little about classical music, though he'd seldom heard it out here in the cane fields. He watched her long fingers roll and dart.

When she began a slow, fingertippy introduction to “Stardust,” he had to sit down. He'd heard the song played by everybody and their pet dog, but her touch was something else, like Nat King Cole's voice made from piano notes, echoey and dusty. She used the old bass sustain pedal to milk the overtones out of the new tuning job, and Claude closed his eyes and saw the notes floating slowly around the room.

The piano tuner was the kind of person who hated for anything to go to waste and thought the saddest thing in the world was a fine instrument that nobody ever touched, so it made him uneasy that someone who could play like this lived alone and depressed in an antique nightmare of a house ten miles from the nearest ear that knew what the hell her fingers were doing. When she finished, he asked her how she spent her time.

She folded her music and glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “Since my father's gone, there's not much to do,” she said, turning on the bench to face him. “Sometimes the different people who lease the land come by to talk. I have television.” She motioned to a floor cabinet model topped by an elaborate set of rabbit ears.

“Lord, why don't you get a satellite dish?”

She turned over a hand in her lap. “I really don't watch anything. It just keeps me company when I can't sleep at night.” She gave him a kind of goofy, apologetic smile.

He began to set his tuning forks in their felt pockets. “As good as you play, you ought to get a decent piano.”

The corners of her little mouth came down a bit. “I tried to get Lagneau's Music to bring out a new upright, but they said the old steps wouldn't hold a piano and moving crew.” She placed an upturned hand on George's yellowed teeth. “They told me they'd never get this big thing off the porch. We're seven feet above the ground here.”

“You can't take it out the back?”

“The steps are worse there. Rotted through.” She let the fall board drop over the ivories with a bang. “If I could get a new instrument, I'd push this out of the back door and let it fall into the yard for the scrap man.” She passed a hand quickly above her dark hair as though waving off a wasp.

He looked up at the rain-splotched plaster. “You ever thought about moving?”

“Every day. I can't afford to. And anyway, the house … I guess it's like family.”

Claude picked up a screwdriver. “You ought to get out more. A woman your age needs…” He started to say she needed a boyfriend, but then he looked around at the rotting curtains, the twelve-foot ceilings lined with dusty plaster molding, and then back at her trembly shoulders, realizing that she was so out of touch and rusty at life that the only man she should see was a psychiatrist, so then he said, “A job,” just because he had to finish the sentence.

“Oh,” she said, as though on the edge of crying.

“Hey, it's not so bad. I work every day, and I'm too busy to get blue.”

She looked at his little box of mutes and felts. “I can't think of a thing I know how to do,” she said.

*   *   *

At supper, Claude's wife was home from her little hole-in-the-wall insurance office, and he asked if she knew Michelle Placervent.

“We don't carry her,” she said, going after a plate of red beans and rice and reading a pamphlet on term life.

“That's not what I asked you.”

She looked up and the light caught in her bottle-brown hair. “Is she still living out in that little haunted castle?”

“Yeah. The whole place shakes just when you walk through it.”

“Why'd they build it on such tall piers? Did the water get that high before they built the levees?”

“Beats me. You ever hear anything about her?” He handed her the hot sauce and watched her think.

“I heard she was depressed as hell, I can tell you that. Boney LeBlanc said she had a panic attack in his restaurant and had to leave just as the waitress brought her shrimp étouffée.” Evette shook her head. “And Boney makes dynamite étouffée.”

“She can play the hell out of a piano,” he said.

“Seems like I heard that.” Evette turned the page on her pamphlet. “Sings, too.”

“She needs to get a job.”

“Well, she knows how to drive a tractor.”

“What?”

“I heard that her father forced her to learn when she was just a kid. I don't know why. Maybe he was mad she wasn't born a boy.” Evette took a long drink of iced tea. “I heard if a field hand left a tractor by the gate and a rain was coming up, he'd send Michelle out to bring it under the shed. Wouldn't even let her change out of her dress, just made her climb up on the greasy thing and go.”

“Damn, I wouldn't have thought she could operate a doorbell,” Claude said.

His wife cut her eyes over to him. “It might surprise you what some people can do,” she told him.

*   *   *

Two weeks later, Claude was sitting in his recliner, his mind empty except for a football game playing in it, when the phone rang. It was Michelle Placervent, and her voice struck his ear like the plea of a drowning sailor. She was crying into the receiver about how three notes on her keyboard had soured and another key was stuck. The more she explained what was wrong with her piano, the more she cried, until she began weeping, Claude thought, as if her whole family had died in a plane crash, aunts and cousins and canaries.

He interrupted: “Michelle, it's only a piano. Next time I'm out your way, I'll check it. Maybe Monday sometime?”

“No,” she cried, “I need someone to come out now.”

Uh-oh, he thought. He hung up and went to find his wife. Evette was at the sink peeling onions, and he told her about Michelle. She banged a piece of onion skin off her knife. “You better go fix her piano,” she said. “If that's what needs fixing.” She looked up at the piano tuner's gray hair as though she might be wondering if Michelle Placervent found him attractive.

“You want to come for the ride?” he asked.

She shook her head and kissed him on the chin. “I've got to finish supper. When Chad gets home from football practice, he'll be starving.” She picked up another onion and cut off the green shoots, her eyes flicking up at him. “If she's real sick, call Dr. Meltier.”

*   *   *

Claude drove out there as quickly as he could, sorry he'd ever tuned the worn-out piano in the first place. Giving a good musician a fine tuning is always a risk, because when the first string starts to vibrate, he gets dissatisfied and calls up, as if one little note that's just a bit off ruins the whole song.

She was dressed in faded stretch jeans and a green sweatshirt, and her hair was unbrushed and oily. The house was as uncombed as she was. Claude looked at her trembly fingers and her wild eyes, then asked if she had any relatives or friends in town. “Everybody is dead or moved far away,” she told him, her eyes streaming and her face red and sticky. He watched her, feeling suddenly tired and helpless. He tried to think what Evette would do for her, and then he went into the kitchen to make her some hot tea. The cabinets looked as though someone had thrown the pots into them from across the room. The stove was a first-generation gas range that should have been in a museum, and it was listing, the floor sagging under it. The icebox was full of TV dinners, and the pantry showed a few cans of Vienna sausage and beanie-weenies. Claude realized that he would be depressed himself if that was all he had to eat.