Grand Change by William Andrews Page B

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.
    â€œHey, 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.
    â€œBut I can’t follow you.”
    â€œThere’s more than three chords in this game, Jake. You want to play with me you’ll have to learn them.”
    â€œLet’s go to Jim Mackie’s some night and get him and Alban to iron things out for us?”
    â€œThere’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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œSounds like ‘The Barley Corn Reel,’” Jim said when we stopped. “You’re in the sharps and flats.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œI want to be an Old Tyme Fiddle Champion,” Wally said. He was bending toward Jim