“You can’t throw me off the island, and you can’t stop me from playing.”
“I’d never want to silence someone with your talent, but I do prefer you do it elsewhere. I’ll tell you why. Let’s forget that if you keep it up Farr will surely shoot you. If you’re allowed to go on, you’ll destroy something fine and good in that house. And for what? For a little while, she’ll be up there with you, but no high lasts. She’ll crash, and when she does, she’ll find that everything really important to her is gone. If you want to try floating through life ten feet off the ground, that’s your business, but you have no right to take her with you.”
“You can’t stop me, man. No one can stop me.”
I sat on a flagstone step. “You’re not invulnerable, Henry. We all have our weaknesses. Yours is music.”
“Music is my strength.”
“Not bad music. Let me tell you what I’m going to do if you don’t leave. I’m going to install speakers pointed at your island. Then I’m going feed the worst music I can find through those speakers. Off-key, distorted, slowed down, speeded up. Music that even a tone-deaf cretin couldn’t stand. Music that is fingernails drawn across a blackboard. In five minutes, your hands will be over your ears. In ten, you’ll be twitching. In fifteen, the furthest thing from your mind will be playing your trumpet ever again. In twenty, you’ll swimming for the far shore. And even if I’m wrong, even if you’re not all that sensitive, you’ll still have to put away your horn because no one will be able to hear a note you blow into it.”
He loomed over me menacingly. “Lawyers have no heart.”
“We turn it in when they hand us the sheepskin, Henry. Now in fairness, I’ll point out that you probably could get a restraining order, but Farr will pay no more attention to that than you did. It’s what’s known as the-shoe-on-the-other-foot maneuver. You want to serenade my client, I’ll serenade you. So, what do you think? Do we have the basis for an agreement?”
Both hands lifted the trumpet above his head, the words a moan of frustration. “I love her, damn you!”
I looked up at him. He didn’t appear to be high on anything more than passion, but that wouldn’t lessen my pain if that trumpet bounced off my skull. “No one who has heard you play can doubt that, but you came along about ten years too late.”
The trembling trumpet shimmered in the moonlight like a headsman’s axe about to descend.
“I have a hard head, Henry. Hit me, and that trumpet becomes trash. That’s no way to treat a fine instrument. I will also smash you in the mouth so hard, your talented lips will become permanent scar tissue. On top of that you go to jail. Sit down and let’s talk.”
He lowered the trumpet slowly and joined me, placing it between his feet and holding his head in his hands.
He moaned. “You got no pity in you, man.”
We talked for a half hour. I’ve never pled a case so passionately and eloquently in my life.
I finished with, “Listen very carefully, Henry. Love is doing what is best for her, and the best thing you can do is go.”
He spread his hands in despair. “Where?”
“If I were you, I’d head for the nearest recording studio. You have a great gift. Don’t confine it to playing moonlight serenades and polkas when you can make thousands of women happy because they’ll think you’re playing just for them.”
The night chill was getting to me. I rose stiffly. “Just go, Henry. Don’t sit around waiting for a miracle. When you can’t win, you settle for a draw. Just hitch up your jeans and get the hell out. You won’t be the only man who had to walk away from the woman he loved.”
His voice broke in grief. “One... last... time?”
No one could have denied him that. “Fair enough. I’ll enjoy hearing it.”
I did. So did Rachel. I saw the tears. Farr didn’t. You don’t lose a world full of orchids wrapped in moonbeams and sprinkled with stars every day.
He was gone the next day. I simply smiled when Farr asked how I’d done it, but naturally, that relationship solidified. He might not like me, but respect was more important. I’d seen that in Tobias.
A year later, Henry sent me an album from New York. When I played it, Judy sat there with glazed eyes. I suspect she plays it even today when I’m not around.
I also suspect Henry sent one to Rachel, who also played it when Ian wasn’t around. Like thousands of other women who felt Henry was playing only for them. It proves, I suppose, that when it comes to the language of love, the message is more important than the medium.
He cut only two albums. Both became collector’s items when someone emptied a .38 in him one night, supposedly a stocky man seen by an apartment house neighbor. The news sent a ripple of sadness through the town, but whatever Rachel felt, she kept it to herself. Exposing your innermost feelings had yet to become fashionable. As far as I know, Ian said nothing.
Several of Henry’s friends wanted him buried on his island, but the town wouldn’t permit it. He ended with the Presbyterians on the far side of the river.
Two years later, they found Tobias sitting alongside a creek in the hills with his fishing pole in his hand and smiling. The number of black limos in the funeral procession must have created a shortage elsewhere.
Judy, Matthew, and I miss him to this day.
Several drinks too many and an icy road took Ian Farr three winters after that. The drinks were understandable. The steel industry was going under, and so was his plant. The buildings are now abandoned shells. The town died with it, like so many others built around steel. Still pretty from afar, but up close the death wounds gape unhealed.
The main street is potholed, storefronts boarded, houses abandoned. Young people are missing; the old ones wear the stunned faces of someone sandbagged from behind. Those who left and came back can’t believe what they see.
Not too many years afterward, Alyssa spent six months holding her mother’s hand and caring for her as she wasted away from one of those tumors that, caught early, late, or in between, kill a person anyway.
When Judy, Matthew, and I first arrived, we had driven up on curving, two-lane blacktops only the locals use now. The state finally — finally — finished an interstate that nips across the north end in a long curve. The exit ramp for the town, as luck would have it, intruded into the Farr family plot in a corner of the cemetery. Not small, that plot. It contained two hundred years of Farrs. The state wanted to move the affected graves elsewhere, splitting up the family.
Fortunately, Alyssa’s father-in-law is a good lawyer. And not without influence.
I made them purchase additional land and convert the plot into a triangle that would follow the curve, moving the graves that were in the way into the new area so that all those Farrs remained together.
On the crisp fall day they were doing that, I got a call to hurry on out there.
A very nervous cemetery manager met me, trailed by a man I took to be the crew foreman. The manager was new, his predecessor having joined his erstwhile charges a year ago.
“My first thought was to keep quiet,” he said, “but there are six men here. One would be sure to say something that would get back to you as the family’s attorney, and I don’t want to be held responsible for something not my fault.”
He led me to the scene of a disaster, explaining as we went.
Ian had already been relocated. The small crane moving Rachel’s coffin hadn’t raised it quite high enough. It struck a small granite outcrop and slipped from the chains. Landing on its corner had sprung the lid open when it hit the ground.
“Swear to God,” the foreman said, “it was only a little bump.”