The cedar fence posts along the county road were gray as driftwood and twice as stubborn after three years of drought. I sat on the tailgate of my old Dodge with a thermos of lukewarm coffee that tasted mostly of chicory, listening to the cicadas rattle in the dry mesquite trees. Back when Arthur was still walking this dirt, we used to sit right here on the tailgate after the sun went down behind the ridge, watching the dust settle over forty acres of scrub oak and nothing else. Arthur loved that piece of ground more than he loved his own knees, which were shot through with arthritis by the time he hit sixty. He used to say the dirt here didn’t lie to you the way people did, and sitting out there in the quiet with the wind kicking up grit against my shins, I figured he was half right.<\/p>\n
The accordion case was always sitting right by the front screen door on Saturday mornings, smelling faintly of camphor and old horsehair. Arthur kept it in a black leather box with brass latches that didn’t quite line up unless you gave them a sharp rap with the heel of your palm. I hated the sound of that thing for the first ten years we were married because it meant he wasn’t fixing the tractor or clearing the brush down by the dry creek bed. He would just sit out on the porch with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, pumping those black bellows until the house vibrated right down to the floorboards.<\/p>\n
“You’re going to wake the whole county up with that racket,” I told him once while I was wiping down the oilcloth on the kitchen table.<\/p>\n
Arthur didn’t even stop playing. He just tipped his head back and squinted at the tin roof. “Let ’em wake up,” he said. “Music’s better for the ears than the wind howling through the fence.”<\/p>\n
That was Arthur. Stubborn as an Osage orange stump and twice as hard to dig out of the ground once he took a notion. When he died in the back bedroom of this very house in the spring of ninety-six, I didn’t cry at the funeral. I just stood out by the open grave with my purse strap twisted around my fingers and watched the red clay slide off the shovels. My sister Clara patted my shoulder until it bruised and whispered that the Lord works in mysterious ways, but I just wanted everyone to go home so I could feed the heifers and get back to the quiet. I didn’t want mysterious ways. I wanted my kitchen table back without his old boots sitting under it like two dead hounds.<\/p>\n
The town square in Amarillo hadn’t changed much since my daddy hauled a trailer full of feed down there back when Eisenhower was in the White House. The brick on the old courthouse was still that dark, greasy red that never quite dried out even when the sun beat down at a hundred degrees. I drove the Dodge in on a Tuesday because the feed store was out of molasses lick tubs, and I needed to see a human face that wasn’t on the television set. That was when I heard it wheezing through the hot afternoon air, rattling off those old German dance tunes that sounded like a funeral dirge played on a tin whistle.<\/p>\n
I parked right by the dry fountain where the pigeons always gathered to peck at gravel. An old man with a straw hat pulled down low over his forehead was sitting on a folding stool by the jewelry store window, squeezing the life out of a red pearloid Hohner accordion with silver corners. People walked past him with grocery sacks and dry-cleaning hangers, dropping quarters into an upturned cigar box without breaking their stride. I stayed by the fender of my truck for a minute, watching the way his left shoulder hitched every time he pulled the bellows out. It was the exact same hitch Arthur had after he dropped the engine block on his collarbone back in sixty-eight.<\/p>\n
A little girl in a yellow dress with white eyelet lace stopped right in front of him, holding a melted ice cream cone in her fist. She didn’t look older than six or seven, with skinny legs and scraped knees that looked like they’d spent the morning climbing pecan trees. She stood there staring at the chrome bass buttons flashing in the sun until the man stopped playing on a long, lingering chord that hung in the humid air like woodsmoke.<\/p>\n
“Why do you play that big box?” she asked. Her voice carried right over the traffic humming down Polk Street.<\/p>\n
The man wiped his forehead with a blue bandanna that had grease stains around the hem. He looked down at her with eyes the color of muddy creek water, deep-set and tired behind wire-rim glasses. “I play for my late wife,” he said, and his voice sounded like dry leaves sliding across concrete. “She loved this song more than she loved the morning coffee.”<\/p>\n
“That’s sad,” the little girl said, tilting her head so the yellow ribbon slipped out of place.<\/p>\n
“No,” the man said, and a slow, crooked grin spread across his face, lifting the corners of his mouth past the gray stubble on his cheeks. “She’s here. Every time you hear this song, she’s still alive right here in the square.”<\/p>\n
The girl didn’t look sad anymore. She dropped her ice cream cone right on the hot pavement, threw her hands up in the air, and started spinning around in a little circle with her skirt flying out around her ankles. The man threw his head back and let out a big, booming laugh that bounced off the brick storefronts across the street. It was a rich, full sound that didn’t belong to a man sitting alone on a sidewalk with an empty cigar box.<\/p>\n
I felt something tighten right behind my ribs, a sharp, hard knot that hadn’t moved since the day Arthur’s heart gave out over by the tractor shed. I hadn’t heard that laugh in thirty years. Not since before the bank foreclosure notice came in the mail, not since before the drought burned the corn down to gray sticks before the silk even formed. Arthur used to laugh like that when we were twenty and didn’t know any better than to think forty acres of dry dirt was an empire.<\/p>\n
I took three steps toward the sidewalk before I stopped myself, my boots crunching on the safety glass left over from some old parking lot fender-bender. The music started up again, faster this time, a bouncy little tune about a beer barrel and a polka party that made the pigeons scatter off the curb. The man wasn’t just playing for some ghost in his head anymore. He was playing for every single person walking past with dust on their shoes and heavy groceries in their arms, turning the whole miserable Tuesday into something you could bear to look at.<\/p>\n
I looked down at my own hands, still stained dark with walnut hull from the tree in the front yard, and I realized why I had stayed out on that porch for so long by myself. Pain wasn’t a fence you built to keep the world out where it couldn’t touch you. It was just the soil everyone had to walk through if they wanted anything to grow at all.<\/p>\n
I didn’t walk over to him. I didn’t have to. I just stood by the fender of my truck until the song ended and the little girl picked up her ruined ice cream with a whimper, and then I climbed back into the cab of the Dodge and turned the key. The starter ground twice before the engine caught with a roar that shook the dashboard.<\/p>\n
When I pulled into the driveway twenty minutes later, the house looked smaller than it did that morning, sitting there under the big cottonwood with the tin roof catching the last red glare of the sun. The cedar gate was swinging open because I forgot to latch it right, and the wind was blowing old corn husks across the bare dirt where the garden used to be. I didn’t rush to fix it. I just cut the engine, sat there in the quiet for a minute with my hands resting on the steering wheel, and for the first time since the winter of ninety-six, I didn’t mind the sound of the wind through the wire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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