Page 17 - WTP Vol. IX #6

But there wasn’t a camera on that tripod. It held a rifle with a scope, trained down the far side of the hill toward the edge of the woods, exactly where those grassy tracks were headed—with Dad on them. The report of Kelsey’s rifle continued to echo around the Gulch long after one of those pigs dropped like a rag.
Dad paused. “That could have been me—that’s what I told your Mom when I got home—shot dead and left to the turkey vultures. She was nursing you on the carport.”
“And what did she say.” “That it’s a jungle out there.”
~
According to Dad, Mom—who hailed from Philadel- phia—had trouble getting use to the language of the Piedmont, to words like awl for oil, and phrases like rat cheer, whatever that meant. Hep was another puzzle. To Mom hep meant hip—that is, cool, with it, groovy. She learned the meaning of hep when Dad bought her a piano.
“Your mother had studied piano for a while and always wanted one,” he said. “When we moved in here together, not long after we met on the faculty at Spring Hill, our combined income, meager as it was, made us feel rich. So the spontaneous purchase wasn’t extravagant. We needed a lift. You’d just been born and refused to sleep more than two hours at a time.”
He shook his head. “Your mother was crying: ‘When will I ever have time for a piano?’ She was exhaust- ed, and she was crying because you were crying. ‘And how will they ever get a piano down that drive-
way, anyway?’ She had a point. But the purchase had been made.”
Our driveway sloped sharply from the cul-de-sac like the hypotenuse of a right triangle. The cul-de-sac itself, on a level with the crest of our roof, slanted to- ward the Gulch as well. The basement wall across the front of our house lay below ground, as you’d expect. But the entire rear basement wall, all of it cinder- block, stood above ground.
The piano—a lovely spinet that sat in the living room until I went off to college— was delivered in the back of a pickup truck, held in place by a net- work of ropes and wrapped in the kind of thick blanket you find in moving vans. The owner of the music store brought it himself, delighted at having sold such an expensive instrument. He even threw in the bench for free.
“But when he saw our driveway,” Dad said, “he seemed to regret the entire transaction. Then he turned to your mother and said, ‘Kin I use your phone? I’m gonna need hep.’”
Mom showed him the phone on the wall in the kitchen, and half an hour later he backed his pickup down the driveway—ever so slowly—with the emer- gency brake on and the hep wedged between the piano and the tailgate. A black wrought-iron railing enclosed the side and rear of our carport, which sat adjacent to the kitchen at the right end of the house. The railing was the kind you see on balconies in New Orleans. Given the slope of our property, the carport was a balcony, with a 15-foot drop into the back yard. Had the emergency brake not held—Dad always laughed at this point in the story—that pickup would have taken out the railing and plunged straight down, tumbling end-over-end into the woods. “And had it banged through the trees as far as the bluff, it might have landed on the roof of Kelsey’s store!”
But the piano made it safely from the pickup to the flat cement surface of the carport. Then it was put on a dolly, pushed through the kitchen, and maneuvered through the hall into the living room.
“When that pickup left,” Dad said, “your mother be- gan to cry again. She’d always wanted a piano. The piano was beautiful, but she had no time to play it. Because you were crying and wanted to be nursed.”
The rest of the story I knew by heart. That piano- heavy pickup scored dual troughs down the drive-
(continued on next page)
10