He flips to another part of the album, one filled with publicity shots and newspaper clippings. Taking out a picture, he hands it to Tyler. “All right, young man, tell me who that is.”
“Duane Allman,” Tyler says without hesitation.
Your pa-paw laughs. “You know it.”
“But this was before the Allman Brothers, right? Back when he was just a studio musician, right?”
“Just a studio musician?”
“I mean—”
“Yeah, Aretha Franklin came in the one week, and Duane just wrote her an R&B hit. Then the Osmonds came in the next week, and we just knocked out a bubblegum hit for them. Then Jimmy Hughes—”
“How about I just keep my mouth shut from now on?” Tyler asks.
Your pa-paw laughs again, handing him another picture. “You don’t know this one. You should, but you don’t.”
“Uh … ”
“Give you a hint. Bruce Springsteen and Pins and Needles both did covers of one of his songs.”
I know he’ll go on forever about FAME Studios and who he wrote songs for and who he went on tour with. And Tyler will lap up every word.
“Okay, I’ll give you another hint,” he says.
I cough loudly. “Actually, Mr. Alton, we need to ask you some stuff. About Holly.”
He smiles and sighs at the same time. “Should have known you didn’t come down just to keep an old fart company.”
Was that a joke, or bitterness? Or one disguised as the other? I cringe, staring up at him, not sure if I should laugh or apologize.
“What do you want to know, Little Bit?”
“We wanted to know if any … strange stuff … has happened. Since the accident.”
“Strange stuff?”
I look at Tyler, still in the pilot’s chair. He gives me a tiny shrug, then tries to help. “Just, y’know, anything strange,” he says.
“Okay, Mr. Alton, you know we’re not crazy, right? I mean, if we tell you something … ”
Your pa-paw’s hands are shaking so bad he can’t hold the album. Setting it down, he presses them flat against the tabletop. “Her ghost is in the river, isn’t it?”
For a moment, there’s only the water lapping against the hull. Me and Tyler stare at him, then turn to stare at each other. I say, “Show him the ring.”
He presses your ring into your pa-paw’s hand. Tyler says, “It’s Holly’s ring. I gave it to her the day she died.”
Turning it between his fingers, your pa-paw sees the word HELP. His eyes darken with pain. Tyler tells him about Rivercall and the catfish, about Pastor Wesley saying he wanted to help and Bo showing up at my house.
Your pa-paw closes long, calloused fingers—musician’s fingers—around the promise ring. He looks stunned. I don’t think he hears half of Tyler’s story. Finally, he asks, “But what’s happening?”
“We don’t know,” I say. “That’s why we came here. We thought maybe you’d know.”
He just shakes his head, and hope evaporates.
“Well, why did you ask if Holly was in the river?”
He bends down and opens his guitar case. Tyler whispers, “The Dreadnought,” in a worshipful tone that makes your pa-paw grin weakly.
“Yeah,” he mutters, slipping the guitar strap over his head. “Can’t go anywhere without her. Only family I’ve got left.”
I cringe again, the joke inch-worming too close to the truth to be funny. But your pa-paw doesn’t notice. Carrying the guitar, he leads us up onto the deck.
The old guitar is a C. F. Martin Dreadnought, its glossy black paint scuffed and scratched. It’s a veteran of a thousand days in sweltering studios, a thousand nights onstage. He told us he won it from Johnny Cash in a poker game. Of course, he also used to tell us he once had a pet saber-toothed tiger named Gut-Ripper Sam, so who knows.
“Couple nights after I came here, I was playing, and … ” He plucks a few notes, stops and tunes one of the strings. “It might not happen this time. I don’t know.”
“What might not happen?” I ask nervously.
“Just keep your eye on the plants.”
He starts playing. Long fingers jump like grease in a hot skillet. The guitar is plain, but it’s plain and true. Notes rise from its rosewood chest. A breeze off the river whirls them out across the marina like dandelion seeds.
Under the tea-colored water, streamers of milfoil wave with the currents. I watch them, wiping sweat from my face without looking away.
Hearing the Dreadnought’s voice again makes me remember those afternoons when you’d ignore me. I’d try on your clothes or bounce a rubber ball against your floor and closet door, getting so mad that you wouldn’t do anything except practice guitar. Sitting on your bed, you’d spend hours curling your fingers at unfamiliar angles across the strings, teaching them to move the way your mind wanted them to.
Tyler lifts his Aviators up, then shakes his head. “What are we—”
I sink fingernails into his arm. “Shhh! Quiet.”
I never take my eyes off the weeds. If I don’t blink, I can see new spirals of leaves unfolding. Stalks stretch upward, slow as the afternoon shadows, reaching toward the music.
People walk by without noticing, but down in the murk, the milfoil winds around dock bumpers and slack mooring ropes. Tiny snowflake flowers blossom, then fall to the water. The longest stalk reaches under the railing, making me jump back. “Stop! Mr. Alton, stop!”
The song breaks off. The clatter of the marina pours back in on us.
I grip the railing and peer down. “Holly? Holly, where are you?”
There’s no sound, no bubbles, no motion in the water except for the plants continuing to grow for several minutes. They keep climbing up the railing, working with the patience of a girl learning her instrument, teaching her fingers to move the way her mind wants them to.
Eight
Your pa-paw stares across the water as he talks. “When I was ten, me and some friends played hooky from school, went swimming in the river. Next day, I got a fever. Bad one, kept me in bed past the end of the school year. Then it got into my liver. After a while my skin turned yellow. My eyes, the whites of them, turned yellow with the jaundice.
“Doctor couldn’t help. Everybody thought my liver would shut down completely, and when that happens, that’s it. That’s the end.” He snaps off a stalk of milfoil curled around the railing post. Raking the spiny leaves across his palm, he squints at them, trying to understand.
“I never told my folks I’d skipped school that day, didn’t think it mattered. But both my folks grew up down in the holler, the river valley back before they built the dam and flooded it all. Finally, they called a root-worker named Mr. Buckley.
“Root-workers had been pretty common in the holler, back before there were any doctors. Mostly they mixed up medicines, helped lay out the dead, and such. But they knew others things too, charms, curses, and things like that. Mr. Buckley was a little grouchy old man, one of those turtle-faced old men, y’know? He came into my room holding the Bible, looks me up and down, then says, ‘What were you up to ’fore you got sick?’
“I told him like I’d told my folks, that I’d just been at school and hadn’t been up to nothing. But Mr. Buckley, he holds that Bible out and says, ‘You ready to swear to it? Swear to it there on your deathbed?’ The word ‘deathbed’ really scared me, so I told him all about playing hooky. Besides, I figured Dad couldn’t whoop me if I was dying.” He chuckles.
“So I told them I’d been swimming, and Mr. Buckley nodded, and scratched his chin, and looked around my room, and finally he tells my folks, ‘The fever must have followed him home. We gotta find it quick, or it’ll do him in.’ So they started searching everywhere, under my bed, in the attic. I thought they’d all gone bananas, y’know? Momma even told Dad to pull up the floorboards. He was about to do just that when he noticed the grille over an air duct had been worked loose. He got down and reached in there, started shouting, and pulled out a frog, piss-yellow and this big.” He holds up his fist to show us its size. “That was it. That was the fever.”