his family got together with guitars.
"Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom!" sang the road-crew man who believed.
But the road-crew man without hands, who held the sings telling the traffic to Stop or Go Slow, listened but
never sang.
"Whyn't you never sing?" asked the man who liked Rogers and Hammerstein; asked all of them, at one time or another.
And the man they called Sugar just shrugged. "Don't feel like singin'," he'd say, when he said anything at all.
"Why they call him Sugar?" a new guy once asked. "He don't look sweet to me."
And the man who believed said, "His initials are CH. Like the sugar, C & H, you know." And the new guy laughed. A stupid joke, but the kind of gag that makes life easier on the road building crew.
Not that life was that hard. For these men, too, had been tested, and they were in the job that made them happiest. They took pride in the pain of sunburn and pulled muscles, and the road growing long and thin behind them was the most beautiful thing in the world. And so they sang all day at their work, knowing that they could not possibly be happier than they were this day.
Except Sugar.
Then Guillermo came. A short Mexican who spoke with an accent, Guillermo told everyone who asked, "I may come from Sonora, but my heart belongs in Milano! " And when anyone asked why (and often when no one asked anything), he'd explain: "I'm an Italian tenor in a Mexican body," and he proved it by singing every note that Puccini and Verdi ever wrote. "Caruso was nothing," Guillermo boasted. "Listen to this! "
Guillermo had records, and he sang along with them, and at work on the road crew he'd join in with any man's song and harmonize with it or sing an obbligato high above the melody, a soaring tenor that took the roof off his head and filled the clouds. "I can sing," Guillermo would say, and soon the other road-crew men answered, "Damn right, Guillermo! Sing it again!"
But one night Guillermo was honest and told the truth. "Ah, my friends, I'm no singer."
"What do you mean? Of course you are!" came the unanimous answer.
"Nonsense!" Guillermo cried, his voice theatrical. "If I am this great singer, why do you never see me going off to record songs? Hey? This is a great singer? Nonsense! Great singers they raise to be great singers. I'm just a man who loves to sing but has no talent! I'm a man who loves to work on the road crew with men like you and sing his guts out, but in the opera I could never be! Never! "
He did not say it sadly. He said it fervently, confidently. "Here is where I belong! I can sing to you who like to hear me sing! I can harmonize with you when I feel a harmony in my heart. But don't be thinking that Guillermo is a great singer, because he's not!"
It was an evening of honesty, and every man there explained why it was he was happy on the road crew and didn't wish to be anywhere else. Everyone, that is, except Sugar.
"Come on, Sugar. Aren't you happy here?"
Sugar smiled. "I'm happy. I like it here. This is good work for me. And I love to hear you sing."
"Then why don't you sing with us?"
Sugar shook his head. "I'm not a singer."
But Guillermo looked at him knowingly. "Not a singer, ha! Not a singer. A man without hands who refuses to sing is not a man who is not a singer. Hey?"
"What the hell did that mean?" asked the man who sang folk songs.
"It means that this man you call Sugar, he's a fraud. Not a singer! Look at his hands. All his fingers gone! Who is it who cuts off men's fingers?"
The road crew didn't try to guess. There were many ways a man could lose fingers, and none of them were anyone's business.
"He loses his fingers because he breaks the law and the Watchers cut them off! That's how a man loses fingers. What was he doing with his fingers that the Watchers
wanted him to stop? He was breaking the law, wasn't he?"
"Stop," Sugar said.
"If you want," Guillermo said, but the others would not respect Sugar's privacy.
"Tell us," they said.
Sugar left the room.
"Tell us," and Guillermo told them. That Sugar must have been a Maker who broke the law and was forbidden to make music any more. The very