abbreviated version of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “My Mama Don’t Allow Me,” Ronnie Paquette found the guitar in one of the swill barrels out back, deposited there by his outraged mom. Ronnie took it to school, where Mrs. Calhoun, the English teacher who doubled as the middle school music teacher, showed him how to put on a new string, and how to tune it by humming the first three notes of “Taps.” She also gave Ronnie a copy of Sing Out!, a folk music magazine that had both lyrics and chord changes to songs like “Barb’ry Allen.”
During the next couple of years (with a brief hiatus during the time when the Ski Pole of Destiny rendered Connie mute), the two boys learned folk song after folk song, trading the old guitar back and forth as they learned the same basic chords Leadbelly no doubt strummed during his prison years. Neither of them could play worth a tin shit, but Con had a pretty good voice—although too sweet to be convincing on the blues tunes he loved—and they performed in public a few times, as Con and Ron. (They flipped a coin to see whose name would come first.)
Con eventually got his own guitar, a Gibson acoustic with the cherry finish. It was a hell of a lot nicer than Hector the Barber’s old Silvertone, and it was the one they used when they sang stuff like “Seventh Son” and “Sugarland” at the Eureka Grange on Talent Night. Our dad and mom were encouraging, and so were Ronnie’s folks, but GIGO holds true for guitars as well as computers: garbage in, garbage out.
I paid little attention to Con and Ron’s attempts to attain local stardom as a folk duo, and hardly noticed when my brother’s interest in his Gibson guitar began to wither away. After Reverend Jacobs drove his new-old car out of Harlow, it felt to me as if there was a hole in my life. I had lost both God and my only grownup friend, and for a long time after I felt sad and vaguely frightened. Mom tried to cheer me up; so did Claire. Even my dad had a go. I tried to get happy again, and eventually succeeded, but as 1965 gave way to 1966 and then 1967, the cessation of badly rendered tunes like “Don’t Think Twice” from upstairs wasn’t even on my radar.
By then Con was all about high school athletics (he was a hell of a lot better at those than he ever was at playing the guitar), and as for me . . . a new girl had moved into town, Astrid Soderberg. She had silky blond hair, cornflower-blue eyes, and little sweater-nubbins that might in the future become actual breasts. During the first years we were in school together, I don’t think I ever crossed her mind—unless she wanted to copy my homework, that was. I, on the other hand, thought of her constantly. I had an idea that if she allowed me to touch her hair, I might have a heart attack. One day I got the Webster’s dictionary from the reference shelf, took it back to my desk, and carefully printed ASTRID across the definition of kiss, with my heart thumping and my skin prickling. Crush is a good word for that sort of infatuation, because crushed is how I felt.
Picking up Con’s Gibson never occurred to me; if I wanted music I turned on the radio. But talent is a spooky thing, and has a way of announcing itself quietly but firmly when the right time comes. Like certain addictive drugs, it comes as a friend long before you realize it’s a tyrant. I found that out for myself the year I turned thirteen.
First this, then that, hence the other thing.
• • •
My musical talent was far from huge, but much larger than Con’s . . . or anyone else’s in our family, for that matter. I discovered it was there on a boring, overcast Saturday in the fall of 1969. Everyone else in the family—even Claire, who was home from college for the weekend—had gone over to Gates Falls for the football game. Con was then a junior and a starting tailback for the Gates Falls Gators. I stayed home because I had a stomachache, although it wasn’t as bad as I made out; I just wasn’t much of a football fan, and besides, it looked like it was going to rain.
I watched TV for awhile, but