It’s something that Arlo Hannon does now and again although not on any schedule. The doing has no name, and no specific sayable why. If you ask what he’s doing – once in a while one of the aides, or a nurse, comes in, sees, and does ask – he answers sideways. Gabriel has always had the touch. The rest of us, well, we hoot and holler, but Gabriel, you see, the boy has the touch. They look at him with sympathy, for the most part. The majority of the people who do this caregiving work are moved by humane impulses; not to say, of course, that the money doesn’t matter. At the same time Arlo’s response is off-putting. People don’t know what to make of it. He is considered eccentric.
You might be, too.
Everywhere he goes he wears a pork pie hat whose color a neutral observer would be hard pressed to find a word for, falling as it does somewhere between coffee and mud. He has a slab of a face, a hatchet nose, small eyes. His old man’s hair is thinly gray, his old man’s body has thickened in the middle such that in outline he looks like a figure made, inexpertly, of clay.
Gabriel lies on his back in the hospital bed. His eyes are open. They often are. If they see, what appears in his damaged brain can only be guessed at, and long ago Arlo got tired of guessing.
To Arlo’s fond eye, the features of the stilled face resemble the boy’s mother’s. Viola was three quarters Italian. Touches of his Hannon lineage, Scots-Irish all day long, are visible as well, especially the jut of the chin, its indentation. With Viola’s death a truce was declared in the war over which side of the family Gabriel favors more. Now that she is gone, her imprint is more obvious.
It’s not true that you can’t die from a broken heart. What happened, the sum and total of all of it spread across a span of dreadful years, was too much for Viola.
The father takes the old Martin D28 guitar and places it on his son’s chest, angling it so that the neck is convenient to the boy’s left hand. He wraps the fingers of the hand around the neck at the first position. The fingers are at once stiff and weirdly cooperative, and Arlo forms them into an A major chord. An A, he has learned by trial and error, is the easiest to accomplish. The shaped chord never lasts long. The arm will drop, the hand will flop. Nevertheless, the silent music of the strings enters deeply into the father. It rings. He would not put it this way, but the sound is what keeps him alive.
The machines that track Gabriel’s vital signs register no appreciable change with this latest musical essay. Not a surprise. As Arlo reaches for the guitar to take it away, he hears a woman’s voice behind him.
“What are you doing?”
It’s a sharp voice. There is no reason to pay it attention.
He picks up the guitar and places it in its case, which he has left lying open on the arms of one of the two visitor chairs. It’s a storied instrument. Used to belong to a sailor in the Merchant Marines by the name of Hopwood who lost a thumb in a knife fight in Borneo and reluctantly gave up music. Bud Hopwood crossed the International Date Line forty times in his days at sea, or so it used to be said.
“What you’re doing,” the woman says in her scratchy-nails voice. She stops, picks it up again. “It’s wrong. It’s sacrilegious.”
“I don’t see that it’s any of your business,” Arlo says calmly.
There is great patience in him, as in the words he speaks, which are bottom-heavy and can take any amount of buffeting. He has had occasion to learn the art. He never puts away the Martin without rubbing it down with a polish cloth. That’s what he does now.
Not to say that the woman standing in the threshold doesn’t irk him. She’s pushing sixty and looks like any woman of that age you’d bump into, coming around an aisle behind her cart at the Wal-Mart, frazzled by the deadly combination of rotten luck and straitened circumstance that has brought her low over a period of decades. Lean she is, and stopped dying her hair some time back. Her chest, once breasts, has become a bosom.
He says goodbye to his son, kissing him on the forehead. He picks up the guitar case. He makes his way to the door where the woman reluctantly gives way. Wordlessly she follows him, two steps behind, down the hall and through the lobby where the pinkish choleric receptionist at the desk looks up and blinks in reflexive disapproval. A chime resounds through the hospital’s speakers. Perhaps it’s meant to sound like church.
The woman stays with Arlo out the door into the parking lot where fall is gaining purchase. The hospital sits on a country road near nothing of particular note. The road is lined by stands of woods and a cattle farm, whose hilly pastures strike an austere pose in their dun dead grass. It’s November now. Everywhere you look the woods of south Virginia are giving up their yellow and red and russet leaves with each gust of wind that troubles them. Arlo feels a sense of speed, but it’s speed without direction.
The great sadness that inhabits Arlo Hannon sometimes draws people to him. They see or feel or otherwise perceive kindred hurt in an old guy whose left leg drags a little as he walks, the consequence of falling in a woodchuck hole a couple years back when he was out raking up black walnuts so they wouldn’t blunt the mower blade. He has known this kind of unexplained attraction to happen. It does not surprise him although he doesn’t much care for it when somebody gloms onto him the way this woman seems to want to do.
He has parked in the farthest row of the lot near a row of sycamores. Still without speaking, the woman watches him carefully place the guitar case in the space behind the seat of his truck. Which thumb was it that Bud Hopwood lost to an island enemy’s knife? It would be nice to know. When he nods a casual goodbye, she finally speaks.
“I know you.”
He shrugs. He does not want to engage in conversation. Each visit to Gabriel ends with a steady sinking of his spirit that lasts what remains of the day and through the evening so that when he finally crawls into bed his limbs are leaden but nowhere near as heavy as his heart.
One of the sycamores shakes off a leaf. It twirls to the ground. The little thud Arlo thinks he hears is a warning. He is susceptible.
“Maybe,” he says to the woman.
“No maybe about it. I seen you at the park that one time. You’re the one they call the Singing Ranger.”
Until he retired three years ago, Arlo worked as a ranger at the Featherfin County Park, Broadhope’s biggest and wildest chunk of protected land located in a bulge on the northwest corner of the map. Twice a week he took his guitar to work and performed, once for kids and the second time for adults. A tradition. Management liked it. It was something they could advertise as a regularly scheduled activity for the park-going public. Somebody else came up with the Singing Ranger moniker. Arlo never cared for it, but it stuck.
Since retirement he has continued to perform at Featherfin, although less often. There’s a new supervisor. She wears her professional worry as a uniform, and music is not on her list of priorities.
“You must be mixing me up with somebody else,” Arlo tells the woman.
This angers her. She dislikes being lied to.
He shakes his head, gets into the truck. Unfortunately, he has left the window down so cannot help but hear her next remark.
“My momma’s in there.” She points to the hospital, whose high, pure functionality has a forbidding aspect.
“Sorry to hear it.”
“Daisy’s her name, Daisy Crowson. She done forgot everything she ever knew. Is that right? You tell me, Mister, is it right?”
“Right don’t come into it,” he says, rolling up the window.
He backs out of his space and drives away. A reasonable person would judge his behavior rude.
Something about the woman’s anger, about Gabriel’s insentient A chord, about the thud of the sycamore leaf does him in that evening. Pouring himself a small whiskey he fires up his computer and watches the band play. It’s old footage, grainy, and the sound quality is poor. But it’s the only recording he possesses of how things used to be.
The Green Valley Ramblers. Country music with a kick. A stage at the Scuffletown fire hall. Arlo is playing bass, the steadiest three-chord daddy around. The twins are there, Tim on drums and Shane sawing away at his fiddle. On guitar, Gabriel is young, he can’t be fourteen. But his mastery of the instrument is obvious even in the crummy video. And the voice… well, if a person has the touch on his instrument and the voice to go with it, there’s no stopping him.
Arlo knows it’s coming but is nevertheless jolted when the camera pans to Viola sitting at one of the long metal tables with some woman friends and Shane’s wife Laura. You can’t hear the words she speaks, but he knows what she’s saying. She is pleased as punch to be there and proud of her men.
Eighteen days after that show – it was a benefit for a farmer too sick from cancer to bring in his hay – there came the first accident. Rain, slick country blacktop, a curve where there should have been a straightaway. It was Timmy behind the wheel. They were going, so the accident recreation officer reported, like a bat out of hell. Inside a minute, Timmy and Shane are gone.
Arlo closes the computer. An infinite weariness having nothing to do with sleep pulls his eyelids down. He has not yet drunk any whiskey. He gets up, pours the liquor down the sink. Rinses the glass. Too early to go to bed. He lies on the couch covered in an afghan that Viola knitted him. It’s purple and blue. He remembers, note by note, the arrangement Gabriel did of Hank Sr.’s Lovesick Blues. It resides in Arlo’s memory in a place he wants to think will outlive him. There are such places.
In the morning, he gets a call from one of the rangers at Featherfin. A new guy, or he used to be new. He wants Arlo to play at an event they are putting together at the park. It’s part of what they now call experiential learning. The idea is, the rangers on duty show their visitors how to recognize and appreciate the plants and the trees, the animals and the insects, how everything that exists – even the stones in their difficult geology – is all connected, part of one mysteriously breathing thing. There is special training for this kind of work. Didn’t used to have it when Arlo was full-time.
He agrees. Only singing, only playing, only standing on a stage and performing does the cloud over his head lift. Not always, but often enough. He drives the truck out to Featherfin that Friday with his guitar and a portable sound system. He sets up where he is directed to set up, just in front of one of the overhang shelters at the picnic area. He used to know these trees. Now they withdraw their sheltering arms, having forgotten him.
Still, there is a November snap in the air. He seems to feel things more when the season is changing, the air is turning cold. It’s a kind of forced waking up and not unpleasant.
There is enough life left in Arlo Hannon, enough music, that he can move his audience of twenty or so. The applause is genuine. And the reaction he elicits is earned, not given. The new guy, Phillips is his name, pumps his hand in gratitude when the show is over. He chews gum and is enthusiastic.
“You really slayed ‘em, Arlo. Much appreciated. Hope you’ll come out and do it again next month.”
Arlo Hannon. He’s what’s left of the Green Valley Ramblers. An ancestor tree from which no branch will grow, no leaf sprout, no blossom blush in the greening spring.
He has been pretending to himself that the woman from the hospital isn’t there, but of course she is. She waits until the little crowd has wandered off for a lecture on the snakes of Virginia and Arlo is packing up his gear.
“You never asked me my name,” she says truculently.
“What’s your name?”
She pronounces it with a spark of defiance that Arlo is unable to appreciate. “Ruth Fairchild.”
“I can’t stay and talk, Ruth.”
“It’s something I need to say.”
“Then say it.”
“I never had the chance to tell my momma she was right. What happened was, she lost her faculties just like that, there was hardly any warning, and I had no opportunity.”
“What was she right about?”
“I married the wrong man. Milton Fairchild was a bottom feeder. He did not deserve to be the husband of any woman, let alone me. Momma knew that, she knew it all along and said so, no holds barred. But I plugged my ears against the truth. I said she didn’t know Milton the way I knew him, she just didn’t know him.”
Arlo understands that she is serving him this bitter personal tidbit because she has to tell somebody. He also understands that she is lying. Slowly he shakes his head, which rests heavy on his neck.
“That ain’t it.”
“What do you mean, that ain’t it?”
“It ain’t your reason why.”
He has given her as much time as he is willing to part with. While they’ve been speaking, he has continued to load his gear into the truck. He walks to the front door, climbs into the cab, and tells her, “Goodbye, Ruth Fairchild.”
Driving home, he wonders how he knew that the woman was lying. It’s part of a gift he has. The gift is his debility and comes from loss.
Nothing much goes on, the next few days. Arlo lives in the country in a house of one story with a blue roof, a blue front door. Out back there’s a small red barn with nothing in it. He used to keep a horse for the boys; the barn still smells of hay. In the woods all day long a red-bellied woodpecker jabbers furiously going from tree trunk to tree trunk, offering up a history of woodpeckers from the dinosaurs on forward. Two or three times, Arlo goes out to the front porch. He stands there and listens wanting to holler at the bird to shut the hell up. He doesn’t.
On Wednesday morning when the old red Hyundai Sonata makes its way down the gravel drive, pulling up in front of the house, inside the house he knows that the person stepping out is going to be Ruth Fairchild. This too is part of his gift, which lacerates in cunning ways.
She stomps to the porch and pounds on the door. When he opens it, she says, “All right, I admit it.”
“Where did you get my address?”
“That ranger at the park, I told him I needed to talk to you about playing some music for the garden club.”
“Are you in the garden club?”
“Hell no. They wouldn’t have me, and you know it.”
“What do you admit?”
“You were right. About what’s got me pissed off.”
She smells like cigarettes, and it’s possible she’s had a drink this morning. He steps aside, and she comes in. She looks around. There’s not much to see. His housekeeping has gone to seed. There’s laundry piled on the couch, a stack of magazines he hasn’t read on the floor next to it, a smell of smoke or grease wafting from the kitchen. On one paneled wall hangs the handsome head of a twelve-point buck that Timmy took with his bow.
She takes a seat as if he has invited her. Arlo feels like he’s boarding a train knowing it’s bound in the wrong direction.
“You want a cup of coffee?”
“Huh? No, thanks. I only wanted to be clear about the true reason I’m so sorry Momma’s brain stopped working. Apart from being a trial for her, of course.”
“And what’s the true reason?”
“I need to tell her I know something. Something big and important. I been knowin’ it forever.”
“What’s that?”
“My daddy was a womanizer.”
“Telling her, that matter to you?”
“I need her to admit she knows it, too.”
“I guess if she did once know, she’s forgot.”
The blue veins in Ruth’s neck pop. Her anger has no place to go. Up and down; in and out are not available. Coolly, Arlo wonders if the popping might be dangerous to her health. His sympathy is thin as broth. The most he is willing to do is let her talk a certain amount. He shoves aside the laundry on the couch and sits down across from her, conscious of his strange gift, which includes a certain kind of colorful listening.
She tells him the story.
Possibly Mrs. Daisy Crowson knows, or used to know before her dementia set in, that her husband Franklin had a wandering eye. Possibly she knew that he had a long-time lover one county over in Prince Edward. That the lover had two children who looked on Franklin as a replacement daddy, or good as. When he took them to the movies, he bought them the extra-large popcorn with plenty of butter, and on their birthdays, he brought them thoughtful presents to the extent his budget, stretched to cover two households, permitted. The woman and her two kids were his family in all but name.
Arlo finds growing inside him a great resistance to hearing any more from Ruth Fairchild. There is no room to spare. His own pain is immense. It needs all the space there is. Still, he forces himself to ask, “And you never said nothing about any of this to your mother? Before, when she could comprehend it?”
“I came close. I came close I don’t know how many times. Always lost my nerve. It was something in her eyes, something glittering behind the eyes, I guess, warning me to either shut up or else talk about what’s for supper.”
She keeps talking. Arlo keeps listening. He learns that her father died young, when she was nineteen. And that it fell to her to drive over to Prince Edward County and inform the other woman that he was gone. How hard that was.
“No, it wasn’t,” says Arlo.
That pulls her up short. The neck veins bulge again. She glares at him.
“Okay,” she says, slumping a little. “She already knew, and I knew she knew. Some friend of hers told her. She read the obituary in the newspaper.”
He waits.
“I was glad to go over to that woman’s house, I confess it. I was dying to hear what she had to say for herself.”
“About what?”
“About everything.”
“And did she say it?”
“Nothing ever turns out the way you think it will, does it? The way it ought to, I guess I mean to say. I liked her. Her name was Camilla. I expected a bitch, a she-devil in red lipstick and high heels, but she was a mild and proper woman who had the knack of loving my daddy. A man who was in certain respects not easy to care for.” She stops. Then, more softly, “I liked her.”
She will say more, if he lets her. She will go on for hours. Arlo thinks very deliberately about that. No, he decides. He leads her to the door, walks her out onto the porch. He watches her make her hip-swinging, hard-luck way to the Sonata. She opens the door. She looks over at him. Nearby, the woodpecker is in a frenzy.
“That is one obnoxious bird.”
“It is.”
“If I was you, I’d take a shotgun to the damn thing.”
“I’m not going to shoot a woodpecker.”
“I know about you,” she says suddenly, having snuck up on him by way of the bird.
He shakes his head. What she knows does not interest him. But she will have her say this one last time.
“You had twin boys, musicians the both of them, like their daddy. They got killed in a car wreck out on the Skinquarter Road.”
Which is it, hot anger or cold contempt, that prevents him from saying, Their names are Timmy and Shane? If neither, then what?
“And then that other boy, the one you go visit in the hospital, he crashed on the very same road, years later. The very same road. Like a miracle only backwards.”
She stands there waiting for a reaction. He’s not sure whether that comes from cruelty or simple human curiosity. He turns away, goes back inside. Hears the engine turn over, and her tires crunching gravel.
She has agitated him. Once she’s gone, he walks in the woods for a while, hands in his pockets, kicking the newly downed leaves. Here, barreling into Arlo’s mind where he is not wanted, comes Danny Meherrin. Danny was local. A talented musician. Played anything with strings. Became a studio musician in Nashville where he made a comfortable living, bought a classy house with acreage and animals. Home on a visit to his folks, he heard Gabriel play and couldn’t get enough. The boy has got the touch, he went around Broadhope telling anybody who would listen. You can play your instrument twenty-three hours a day, you can teach yourself every lick and riff and chord change known to man, but if you ain’t got the touch, it don’t matter, does it?
Arlo listened.
A couple weeks later, Danny called from Nashville. Tall Steve Satterfield needed a guitar player. The guy who’d played with him the last seven years was having woman problems. The woman problems had led to substance abuse problems, or the other way around. In any case he was no longer reliable.
Tall Steve was big. He was national. He was going out on a three-month cross-country tour and willing to hire Gabriel based on Danny Meherrin’s say-so. It was the break for his son that Arlo always knew would come his way.
Gabriel turned it down.
Arlo was flabbergasted. Dismay followed shock. He tried. Tried some more. But did not begin to understand. How could Gabriel walk away from being Tall Steve Satterfield’s guitar player? Money, tour buses, big stages. Glitter. It became a sore subject between father and son. Arlo said the wrong things the wrong way. Said them again. Gabriel got his back up. He went around with a sour face, no smile, full of resentment. Viola tried to soften things between them. She failed.
Hard words.
And then Gabriel crashed his car on the Skinquarter Road.
There were those who said the accident was foreordained, in view of what happened to the twins. Such empty-headed tongue-wagggers didn’t know what they were talking about. It was the sheer vicious delight of gossip, the odious pleasure of witnessing another’s suffering, that was what motivated them. If there was a reason for the crash, it resides in mystery to this day in the tightly packed coils of memory in Gabriel’s sleeping brain.
Arlo puts the D28 in the truck. He drives to the hospital. It’s not visiting hours, but they’ll let him in, they always do. If pushed by a pushy person, somebody like Ruth Fairchild, he could not say why he wants to do what he does. Not wants to do, has to do.
In the room, on the bed, the boy’s eyes are closed. The readouts on the screens of the monitor machines are colorful and expressive and hopeless. Arlo knows Gabriel will never come out of it. Out in the hall he hears the scuffing of sneakered feet, a giggle choked back, the steel wobble of a wheeled cart.
He places the guitar across his son’s chest. He picks up the recalcitrant arm to which an indifferent hand is attached. In torment he forms the A chord. Cool unpliant fingers touch the flat wound strings. They won’t stay there long. But in the instant of contact Arlo will hear and revere the music that he alone in the world knows is there. It’s the music that can’t be played unless you have the touch.
