Welding with Children (12 page)

He looked in her eyes to see what was going on. “You gonna skid this thing down the hardwood on this rug? We can't just push it ourselves?”

“Give it a try.”

He leaned on it, but he was a small man, and the piano didn't budge. “I see what you mean.” He looked down the hall to the open rear door. “You think it'll slide onto the porch and fall through the back steps?”

“They have to be replaced anyway. Mr. Arcement said he would cart away the mess next week.” She ran the cable under the keyboard and around the back through the handholds, completing a loop and setting the hook. When she passed by the piano tuner, he smelled gasoline on her clothes, and he walked to the back door to see what she'd hooked the cable to. Idling away in the yard was a John Deere 720, a big two-cylinder tractor running on propane.

“God Almighty, Michelle, that tractor's the size of a locomotive.”

“It's the only one out in the barn that would start,” she said, dropping the cable's slack into the yard.

He looked out at the rust-roofed outbuildings, their gray cypress darkening in the drizzle. She began picking her way down the porous steps, which didn't look like they'd support his weight, so he went out the front door and walked around to the back. He found Michelle standing on the right axle housing of the tractor, facing backward, looking into the hall at the piano. The machine's exhaust was thudding like a bass drum. He remembered that older John Deeres have a long clutch lever instead of a foot pedal, and she was easing this out to take up slack in the cable. A tire rolled up on the septic tank's lid, and the front end veered sharply. Claude didn't know exactly what she was trying to do, but he offered to help.

“I've planned this through. You just stay on the ground and watch.” She sat in the seat, found reverse gear, backed the tractor closer to the house, snugged the steering wheel with a rubber tie-down so it wouldn't wander again, then eased forward in the lowest gear until the cable was taut. With the slack out of the line, she put the lever all the way forward and the machine began to crawl. Claude walked way out in the yard, stood on tiptoe, and saw George skidding down the hall, wandering from side to side but looking as though it would indeed bump out of the house and onto the back porch. About three feet from the door, the piano rolled off the rug and started to turn broadside to the entryway. Michelle stopped the tractor and yelled something. He couldn't understand it over the engine noise, but she might have been asking him to go inside and straighten the piano. She stepped out onto the axle again, leaned forward to jump to the ground, and the piano tuner held his breath because there was something wrong with the way she was getting off. Her rain slicker caught on the long lever and he heard the clutch pop as it engaged. Michelle fell on her stomach, the big tractor moving above her. Claude ran over, and when she came out from under the drawbar, he grabbed her arm to get her up. Meanwhile, the tractor had pulled the piano's soundboard flat against the entryway to the house, where it jammed for about half a second. The tractor gasped as its governor opened up and dumped gas in its engine, and,
chak-chak,
the exhaust exploded, the big tires squatted and bit into the lawn, and the piano came out with the back wall of the entire house, three rows of brick piers collapsing like stacks of dominoes, the kitchen, rear bedroom, and back porch disintegrating in a tornado of plaster dust and cracking, wailing boards. A musical waterfall of slate shingles rattled down from the roof, the whole house trembled, nearly every windowpane tinkled out, and just when Claude and Michelle thought things had stopped collapsing, the hall fell in all the way to the front door, which swung closed with a bang.

The tractor kept puttering away toward the north at around four miles an hour, and the piano tuner wondered if he should run after it. Michelle began to make a whining noise deep down in her throat. She hung on to him and started to swing as if she'd pass out. He couldn't think of a word to say, and they stared at the wreck of a house as though considering putting it back together with airplane glue, when a big yellow jet of gas flamed up about where the stove would be in all the rubble.

“A fire,” she said breathlessly, tears welling up in her eyes.

“Where's the closest neighbor?” he asked, feeling at least now he could do something.

“The Arcements'. About a mile off.” Her voice was tiny and broken as she pointed a thin white arm to the east, so he gathered her up and walked her to the front, putting her in his van and tearing out down the blacktop toward the nearest working telephone.

*   *   *

By the time the Grand Crapaud Volunteer Fire Department got out to Michelle Placervent's place, the house was one big orange star, burning so hot that it made little smoke. The firemen ran up to the fence but lost heart right there. They began spraying the camellias at roadside and the live oaks farther in. Claude had rescued Michelle's Lincoln before the paint blistered off, and she sat in it on the side of the road, looking like a World War II refugee he had seen on the History Channel. Minos LeBlanc, the fire chief, talked to her for a while and asked if she had insurance.

She nodded. “The only good thing the house had was insurance.” She put her face in her hands then, and Claude and Minos looked away, expecting the crying to come. But it didn't. She asked for a cup of water, and the piano tuner watched her wash down a pill. After a while, she locked her Lincoln and asked him to take her into town. “I have an acquaintance I can stay with, but she won't come home from work until five-thirty.” She ran her eyes up a bare chimney rising out of the great fire. “All these years and only one person who'll put me up.”

“Come on home and eat supper with us,” he said.

“No.” She looked down at her dirty slacks. “I wouldn't want your wife to see me like this.” She seemed almost frightened and looked around him at the firemen.

“Don't worry about that. She'd be glad to loan you some clothes to get you through the night.” He placed himself between her and the fire.

She ran her white fingers through her curls and nodded. “All right,” but she watched him out of the corner of her eye all the way into town, as though she didn't trust him to take her to the right place. About a block before Claude turned down his street, she let out a giggle, and he figured her chemicals were starting to take effect. Evette showed her the phone and she called several people, then came into the living room, where Claude was watching TV. “I can go to my friend Miriam's after six-thirty,” she said, settling slowly into the sofa, her head toward the television.

“I'll take you over right after we eat.” He shook his head and looked at the rust and mud on her knees. “Gosh, I'm sorry for you.”

She kept watching the screen. “Look at me. I'm homeless.” But she was not frowning.

When the six o'clock local news came on Channel 10, the fifth story was about a large green tractor that had just come out of a cane field at the edge of Billeaudville, dragging the muddy hulk of a piano on a long cable. The announcer explained how the tractor plowed through a woman's yard and proceeded up Lamonica Street toward downtown, where it climbed a curb and began to struggle up the steps of St. Martin's Catholic Church, until Rosalie Landry, a member of the Ladies' Altar Society, who was sweeping out the vestibule, stopped the machine by knocking off the tractor's spark-plug wires with the handle of her broom. As of five-thirty, Vermilion Parish sheriff's deputies did not know where the tractor had come from or who owned it and the battered piano.

Claude stood straight up. “I can't believe it didn't stall out somewhere. Billeaudville's four miles from your house.”

Michelle began laughing, quietly at first, her shoulders jiggling as she tried to hold it in. Then she opened her mouth and let out a big, sailing laugh, and kept it going, soaring up into shrieks and gales, some kind of tears rolling on her face. Evette came to the door holding a big spoon, looked at her husband, and shook her head. He reached over and grabbed Michelle's arm.

“Are you all right?”

She tried to talk between seizures of laughter. “Can't you see?” she keened. “It escaped.” On the television, a priest was shaking his head at the steaming tractor. She started laughing again, and this time Claude could see halfway down her throat.

*   *   *

A year later, he was called out for four tunings in Lafayette on one day. September was like that for him, with the start of school and piano lessons. On top of it all, Sid called him to fish a bottle of bar nuts out of the lounge piano. He got there late, and Sid bought him supper in the restaurant before he started work.

The manager wore his usual dark gray silk suit, and his black hair was combed straight back. “Your friend,” he said, as if the word
friend
held a particularly rich meaning for them, “is still working here, you know.”

“Yeah, I was over at her apartment last month tuning a new console for her.” Claude shoveled up pieces of hamburger steak.

“You know, there's even some strange folks that come in as regulars just to hear her.”

Claude looked up at him. “She's a good musician, a nice woman,” he said between chews.

Sid took another slow drink, setting the glass down carefully. “She looks nice,” he said, emphasizing the word
looks.
The piano tuner recognized that this is how Sid talked, not explaining, just using his voice to hint at things. The manager leaned in to him. “But sometimes she starts speaking right in the middle of a song. Strange things.” He looked at his watch. “She's starting early tonight, for a convention crowd, a bunch of four-eyed English teachers.”

“What time?”

“About eight.” He took a drink and looked at the piano tuner. “Every night, I hold my breath.”

*   *   *

That evening, the room was cool and polished. A new little dance floor had been laid down next to the piano, and Michelle showed up wearing round metal-frame glasses and a black velvet dress. The piano was turned broadside to the room, so that everyone could watch her hands. She started playing immediately, a nice old fox-trot Claude had forgotten the name of. Then she played a hymn, then a ragtime number. He sat there enjoying the bell quality of his own tuning job. Between songs, she spotted him, and her eyes ballooned; she threw her long arms up and yelled into the microphone, “Hey, everybody, I see Claude from Grand Crapaud, the best piano tuner in the business. Let's give Claude a round of applause.” A spatter of clapping came from the bar. Claude gave her a worried glance, and she made herself calm, put her hands in her lap, and waited for the applause to stop. Then she set a heavy book of music on the rack. Her fingers uncurled into their ivory arches, and she began a slow Scott Joplin number with a hidden tango beat, playing it so that the sad notes bloomed like flowers. Claude remembered the title—“Solace.”

“Did you know,” she asked the room over her microphone during the music, “that Scott Joplin played piano in a whorehouse for a little while?” Claude looked out at all the assembled English teachers, at the glint of eyeglasses and name tags and upturned, surprised faces. He understood that Michelle could never adjust to being an entertainer. But at least she was brave. “Yes,” she continued, “they say he died crazy with syphilis, on April Fool's Day, 1917.” She nodded toward the thick music book, all rags, marches, and waltzes. “One penicillin shot might have bought us another hundred melodies,” she told the room. “That's kind of funny and sad at the same time, isn't it?”

She pulled back from the microphone, polishing the troubling notes. Claude listened and felt the hair rise on his arms. When she finished, he waved at her, then got up and walked toward the lobby, where he stood for a moment watching the ordinary people. He heard her start up a show tune, and he turned and looked back into the lounge as three couples rose in unison to dance.

T
HE
P
INE
O
IL
W
RITERS'
C
ONFERENCE

He was a Presbyterian minister, a tanned little man who'd always wanted to write something more significant than sermons. He was seated in the first session of the Pine Oil Writers' Conference, held at a tiny junior college built in the shadow of an abandoned turpentine mill outside of Pine Oil, Louisiana. At the front of the classroom, three panelists and a moderator had already begun to argue about how to put together a novel. The minister, Brad, thought they were fractious and rude, and so they must indeed be intellectuals, especially Charles Lamot, the long haired, sixty-five-year-old gentleman in the turtleneck sweater. He was Pine Oil Junior College's most famous creative writing teacher, and at the moment was railing against the idea that a novel had to have a plot, as though the concept were a regressive plan thought up by Republican senators. When the old professor turned his head, Brad could see a grapefruit-sized bald spot in the middle of a wreath of gray hair, and he imagined the teacher sitting in a coffeehouse in San Francisco back in the sixties, wearing a black turtleneck and laboring over his manuscript, accompanied perhaps by an undernourished woman with straight blond hair who hovered next to him, smoking and studying the middle distance. “Nowadays, people expect to be entertained when they buy a book,” the professor complained. “No one wants to
think
anymore.” He looked away from the audience as though unable to bear the expectant, middle-class faces. “It is so boring to be entertained,” he said with an arthritic wave of the hand.

Brad had received the conference flyer in the mail, and he spread it out now on the creaking student desk and saw that the professor had published one novel in Canada in the 1970s. He wondered if the likes of Charles Lamot could supply what he was looking for, that magic, holy thing all writing hopefuls sought: The Answer. Brad imagined that locked up inside him somewhere was a novel that would dazzle the world, or at least create a few sparks in his hometown of Mandeville, Louisiana, and he'd decided to come to the meeting, to hear someone stand up and say,
To put the magic that is in you down on the page, you must listen to this—The Answer.
He worried that he might have a talent that he was wasting, and that he could be called into account for this in the next life, that God might be someone like his burly uncle Ralph, who had given him a circular saw twenty years ago and who never failed to ask, “Hey, boy, you makin' something with that saw I give you? You keeping oil on it?”