Grand Change by William Andrews Page A

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.
    â€œBut that ain’t ‘Saint Anne’s Reel,’ Jake.”
    â€œFigured we could work that out between us.”
    â€œYou’re going to tie me up and slow me down, Jake.”
    â€œYou’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.
    â€œThey’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,