by Cary Fagan
“Please be quick.”
“Have something to work on? Something maybe to strum ‘O Susannah’ on?”
“How do you know?” Jeremiah asked.
“Let’s see. Maybe it’s the music you’re always listening to. Or that instructional DVD you carry around. Or that broken chair you smuggled into the car, or — ”
“Okay, okay. Just don’t tell my parents.”
“I’m a chauffeur, not a snitch. Unless I catch you smoking. You aren’t smoking, are you?”
“Of course not.”
They reached the house. Jeremiah sprinted to the front door. He took the stairs two at a time all the way to the third floor. He flung himself into his room and threw open the cupboard doors. He proceeded to pull out railroad sets and microscopes, games and puzzles and model airplane kits.
Finally, at the very back, buried under a pile of stuffed animals, he found the guitar. He remembered now how it had got broken. A boy his parents had wanted him to play with (“he comes from an excellent family”) had used it as a cricket bat.
It was smaller than he remembered, and the neck wasn’t just cracked but broken right off.
And the tuners? Yes, they had little metal gears and plastic ends. Yes, they turned. Yes, they were attached by tiny screws. They were real.
Jeremiah needed a tiny screwdriver to take out the screws. Fortunately he remembered that cook kept a little eyeglass repair kit on the counter by the spices. He took the screwdriver back to his room and carefully removed the screws.
At school, while Ms. Threap held the banjo. Jeremiah placed a tuner so that the little metal shaft went through the hole in the headstock.
It fit.
“Nice going, Larry.” Jeremiah grinned happily. She handed him a screwdriver and he got to work.
An hour later his banjo was finished. He had to do only one thing.
Inside the pot, on the dowel stick that couldn’t be seen except from the back, he wrote something using an indelible marker.
He wrote the word Destiny.
•••
JEREMIAH LEANED forward to tap on Luella’s shoulder.
“I finished it,” he said.
Luella turned around in her seat. “What? Your project on Aztec human sacrifice?”
“No, the banjo.”
“You’re done? You’re really done?”
“Who’s talking?” asked the teacher, tapping her chalk on the board. “You again, Luella? That’ll be an extra page of math homework for you.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Mickelweiss. I don’t know what’s come over me.” Then to Jeremiah she whispered, “Meet me on the steps after school.”
“Luella! That’s two extra pages.”
Luella sighed. “I’m doing so much extra work,” she said, “that I should be able to graduate twice.”
Jeremiah waited on the front steps of the school. He stamped his feet and watched his breath steam. The fall had turned cold, and the air smelled like snow.
At last Luella came bursting through the doors.
“I can’t believe you’re actually finished. How does it sound?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“It doesn’t have any strings.”
“Oh, come on, Jeremiah.” Luella collapsed onto the steps. “No strings?”
Jeremiah sat down, too. “I tried this old fishing line but it broke. I read about a man who pulled wires out of a screen door to use as strings, but our house doesn’t have any screen doors. I even tried dental floss — mint, cranapple, double-waxed and triple-strength.”
“You spend all this time building a banjo and now you’re defeated because you don’t have any strings. You’re too much, Hayseed.”
Just then Monroe pulled the limousine up the curving drive of the school. The long black car stopped, its engine purring.
“I have to go,” Jeremiah said. “I’ll call you later.”
Jeremiah opened the door, only to find Luella sliding in after him.
“What are you doing?”
“None of your beeswax. Hi, Monroe,” she said, shutting the door. “Would you mind making a small detour?” She leaned forward and whispered into the chauffeur’s ear.
“I’d be delighted,” Monroe said. He took a pair of sunglasses from his pocket and slipped them on. “What do you think of these? They make me look more like a real chauffeur.”
“You are a real chauffeur,” Jeremiah said.
The car began moving down the drive. Luella opened up her knapsack.
“You won’t tell me where we’re going?” Jeremiah said.
“Can you stop yakking so that I can do all this extra homework you made me get?”
Luella shushed him as she began working.
They passed fields and then houses and then the first shops of town. Monroe turned onto Stanley Street and pulled over when he reached Melrose Avenue. Then he parked in front of a store.
Melrose Music Shop.
“Luella, I can’t buy strings…”
But she was already out the door.
It was an old shop, small, with some ukuleles and guitars on the walls, some student violins and a couple of electric keyboards. There were no banjos.
But Luella went up to the counter. The young guy behind it was stacking guitar picks one on top of another until they fell over. Then he started again.
Luella said, “Do you have any banjo strings?”
“What kind?”
“Kind? The most popular, I guess.”
“None of them are popular. We probably don’t even have any.”
“Maybe you could look.”
He rolled his eyes and then turned around and climbed onto a stepladder. He looked at one label after another and then reached to the back of the highest shelf. He blew the dust off a small box, making himself cough.
“You’re in luck. There’s one set. But it doesn’t have a price on it. I can charge you five bucks.”
Luella pulled a fistful of change from her pocket and poured it onto the counter. She counted it coin by coin.
“I’ve only got three dollars and sixty-five cents.”
“Better than nothing,” the young guy said, sweeping up the change.
Luella picked up the packet of strings and went out again, Jeremiah following.
“Luella, what are you doing?”
Luella stopped on the sidewalk. “Doing? I’m not doing anything. I really don’t know why I bought these strings. I don’t even play the banjo.”
She took another step and tossed the packet into an open trash can. Then she turned in a huff and went to the car.
Jeremiah looked at the packet resting on a brown banana peel, a stained coffee lid and a container of ketchup-smothered fries. He hesitated a moment and then snatched it up by the corner and ran after her.
7
Bum-Diddy
THE BANJO lay on Jeremiah’s bed, strung up and ready to play. He thought it looked pretty good. It had a long, straight neck. The wooden bridge held the five taut strings over the cookie-tin pot.
Jeremiah had carefully turned the tuners to get each string in tune. He had held the banjo in his lap and felt the smooth rounded back of the neck with his left hand. He had plucked each string with his finger, and they had rung out sounding like a real banjo, bright and tinny and clear.
Now all he had to do was learn how to play it.
He put his blanket and pillows against the door to muffle the sound so that his parents wouldn’t hear. He had the DVD, “Elements of Clawhammer Banjo,” in his computer.
He picked up the banjo, sat down in his desk chair, and pressed Play.
The young man with the trimmed red beard appeared. He had an easy smile and a jokey personality that made Jeremiah feel
as if a giraffe could learn how to play the banjo.
But he didn’t feel the same way after working for an hour on what the man called “the basic strum.” This was how the right hand plucked the strings, and it required three movements in a rhythm known as “bum-diddy.”
First Jeremiah had to pluck a single string with the back of a fingernail.
Then he had to strum the strings with his hand in a “claw” shape. Then he had to pluck the fifth string with his thumb. And he had to do it smoothly, over and over.
At the end of the hour, Jeremiah’s head ached. The tips of his fingers hurt, and his back was sore. When he heard the maid ringing for dinner, he was only too glad to go down.
•••
“SO CAN YOU play it yet?” Luella plonked herself down at the lunch table across from him with her tray.
Jeremiah just looked at her.
“What’s with the death stare? Don’t tell me. Let me guess. It’s…ah…actually hard?”
“I kind of thought it would just come to me.”
“Sure, because you’re a once-in-a-generation prodigy. A born genius of the five-string banjo. It’s a musical instrument, Jeremiah. You think only the piano is difficult?”
“I don’t think I have the talent for it.” He pushed away his plate of ravioli.
“If you’re not going to eat that,” she said, spearing one with her fork. “You know what, Jeremiah? I think you should quit. After all, you’ve been at it for…how long is it now? Oh, right, a whole day. Just because it’s what you wanted to do more than anything else in the world shouldn’t make a difference. Yeah, I say chuck it.”
“That’s pretty obvious psychology you’re trying to use on me.”
“For me to use psychology on you, you’d have to actually have a brain.”
“Well, you’d find it hard, too.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to play the banjo. You’re not going to eat that chocolate pudding, either? No sense letting it go to waste. So, what exactly are you going to do?”
“Try again, I guess.”
“Excellent. I knew you’d listen to your inner nerd.”
“Sometimes I really hate you, Luella.”
“Does that mean that the rest of the time you love me?” She fluttered her eyelashes at him. Then she said, “See you later,” put her tray on her head, and balanced it there as she walked away.
•••
THAT EVENING, Jeremiah practiced for another hour. And the next night and the next. And the one after that.
On Saturday his parents went out of town to judge a tri-county speed-flossing contest. They asked Jeremiah if he wanted to go with them. But Jeremiah said that he still had to work on his school project, so they left him behind.
He put on the DVD again and then practiced the basic strum, doing what Red Beard had demonstrated. He groaned in frustration and put down the banjo. He went downstairs, raided the fridge for leftover grilled calamari, and watched a TV rerun about some kid called the Beaver.
But he couldn’t stay away. He turned the TV off and marched back upstairs and grabbed the banjo. He placed the pot on his right knee, held the neck with his left hand, and strummed.
His strumming felt easier. His rhythm was more regular. It even sounded…okay.
Jeremiah strummed on and on. He sped up, messed up, started again.
He had it. He really had it! He stood up, holding the banjo by the neck, and danced around.
“Yes, yes, yes! Woohoo!”
•••
The first tune Jeremiah learned was called “Black-Eyed Suzie.” It had a couple of neat slides in it, when he had to move a finger of his left hand along a string, making the note rise up.
Three days later he learned “Barlow Knife,” and after that, “Salt River.”
Because he didn’t have frets, he made some small marks with a Sharpie pen on the side of the neck to help him know where to put the fingers of his left hand. He discovered that there were several ways to tune a banjo. It was often these tunings that gave the tunes their off-kilter, mournful sound — like the sad mewling of a lonely cat.
As playing became more natural, Jeremiah was able to practice longer — up to two hours a day if his parents were out at the dispenser factory. Over the weeks he developed calluses on the fingers of his left hand. He learned how to do “hammer-ons,” hitting the fretboard with a finger to sound a note, and “pull-offs,” which were the opposite. Harder to learn were “double-thumbing” and “drop-thumbing,” to play quicker notes and more complicated melodies.
He gradually picked up speed. Sometimes, when he was in a real groove, it felt as if he was galloping along.
After three months he knew he was still a beginner, but he began to think of himself as a banjo player. And the only one who knew was Luella.
“You’re lucky that your parents forgot about the shop project,” Luella said. “But at some point you’re going to have to tell them.”
“As long as that point isn’t today,” Jeremiah said.
8
Flower Power
SPRING ARRIVED. Jeremiah played his banjo every chance he could get. When he had learned everything on the DVD, he moved on to a book for intermediate clawhammer players. He practiced scales and arpeggios and exercises. He learned new tunes.
At first when he tried to sing as he played, his hands got all mixed up. But gradually he learned to do two things at once. He sang “Little Birdy” and “Cluck Old Hen.” And the song he had first heard on that porch so long ago, “Shady Grove.”
He didn’t always practice. A lot of the time he played for fun. His room had a stairway up to a turret overlooking the vast back garden. Sometimes in the evening, when his parents were at a dentists’ convention or a golf club dinner, he would sit out there and play.
The banjo sounded right outside, with the chirping of birds and the splash from the waterfall below. He could play for a good hour before running out of tunes he knew.
One day in May, Luella leaned back in math class and said to Jeremiah, “I made you something.”
“What is it?”
“You’ll find out if you invite me for dinner.”
“I’ll ask my parents.”
“Your parents adore me.”
“Okay, fine. Come tonight.”
“Well, if you insist.”
In the limousine home, Luella wouldn’t tell him what she had made. Nor while they were doing their homework together. At dinner she acted the perfect guest. She always said please and thank you. She even encouraged Jeremiah’s parents with their idea to have a miniature yacht built for the moat.
Then, in the middle of dessert (cherry meringue surprise), she turned to Jeremiah.
“I’m so excited about the spring talent night,” she said in her best goody-goody voice. “I can’t decide which violin piece to play. What about you, Jeremiah? Are you playing piano again?”
“I haven’t really — ”
“Of course he is,” said his father. “Maestro Boris thinks Jeremiah has really improved.”
“He said I wasn’t as terrible as before,” Jeremiah said.
“Well, it’s the same thing,” said his mother. “I think you should play something by Bach. It’s good to be ambitious. Isn’t it, Luella?”
“Oh, absolutely, Mrs. B. And I’m sure Jeremiah’s up to it. He’s so modest.”
Up in his room, Jeremiah said to Luella, “I could have murdered you for that. I’ve been trying to find a way to get out of talent night. Now they’ll never let me skip it. Thanks a bunch.”
“Do you want to see my present or not?”
“Not if it’s got anything to do with talent night.”
“Well, it doesn’t.” She opened her knapsack and pulled out a folded wad of heavy material.
It looked like a quilt. Exce
pt when Luella unfolded it, Jeremiah saw it had two cloth straps and a zipper running up the side.
“What is it, a giant diaper bag?”
“You can’t tell? Geez. It’s a bag to carry that tin can in.”
“A gig bag! Cool. Let me try it.”
Jeremiah unzipped the side and slipped his banjo into it. He zipped it up again and put a strap over each shoulder. Then he paced around his room with the banjo on his back.
“Hey, this is great. I can take it around with me. I can go and play in the park. I can take it to a jam session, if I ever find one.”
“You want to make jam?”
“No, a jam session. Where musicians come together to play.” He slipped the bag off his shoulders and held it in front of him. “Do you think these flowers on it look a little silly?”
“Haven’t you heard of Flower Power? Anyway, I made it from my grandmother’s old dressing gown. It was the only material I had. You should bring Destiny to school tomorrow.”
Jeremiah put it back on his shoulders.
“Maybe I will,” he said.
•••
JEREMIAH HAD TO slip out of the house without his parents seeing the Flower Power banjo bag. He kept it against his side as he passed the dining room. Fortunately his father had the latest copy of Annals of Dental Floss in front of his face. He was reading aloud the latest figures from Scandinavia.
“Those Scandinavians have healthy gums,” said Jeremiah’s mother.
Jeremiah threw himself into the back of the limousine, slamming the door shut behind him. Monroe glanced into his rearview mirror as he pulled out of the drive.
“Luella did a fine job with that bag,” Monroe said.
“I must be crazy taking it to school,” Jeremiah said. “It’s like committing social suicide.”
“That reminds me,” said Monroe, “of when I was the first boy to wear bellbottoms to school. Bright red with peace symbols all over them.”
“Did the other kids make fun of you?”
“Worse. But then Mary-Beth Matheson came up and told me that she liked them. Made it all worth it.”
“Well, there’s no Mary-Beth Matheson in my life.”
“Maybe you just haven’t met her yet.”
