Banjo of Destiny (2 page)

O Beloved Fernwood!

EVERY MORNING
the Birnbaum chauffeur, whose name was Monroe, drove the limousine up to the front of the house. Jeremiah would come down the grand staircase carrying his briefcase and wearing his school uniform — blazer, striped tie, gray pleated trousers and shiny black shoes. His parents would be waiting at the bottom to inspect him. They would make sure his tie was knotted properly, his shirt had no spots of juice on it, and his socks matched.

Monroe was supposed to hop out of the limousine and open the back door, but he knew Jeremiah hated that. So he let Jeremiah open the door himself. Unless, of course, his parents were watching.

“Where to, Jeremiah?” Monroe said one morning in October. He was supposed to call Jeremiah “Master Birnbaum,” but he knew Jeremiah didn't like that, either.

“Anywhere,” Jeremiah said. “São Paulo, Brazil.”

“Tempting. How about school, instead?” “Can't you be like a chauffeur in a movie? The cool kind who just does what the kid wants?”

“I'm sympathetic, Jeremiah, I really am. But we don't have enough gas to get to São Paulo. And I do think you need at least a grade-school education.”

The Fernwood Academy had been founded 103 years earlier by Lincoln Fernwood iii, the richest man in town. It rose up on a hill above the town and looked like a gigantic haunted house with narrow spires and leaded windows and gargoyles.

Every morning at assembly the students sang the school anthem:

O beloved Fernwood

We pledge our hearts to thee!

Do teach us well, so that one day

We'll run this fair countree…

Parents paid outrageous fees to send their children to Fernwood. But there were also a small number of scholarships for bright students whose families could not afford the tuition. One of those students, Luella Marshall, was Jeremiah's best friend. His only friend, actually.

Jeremiah and Luella met in gym class while picking sides for a baseball game. Jeremiah was used to being picked somewhere near the end, if not last. But Luella, who was the captain of one team, picked him second. (“Because you looked so sorry for yourself,” she told him later.) He was so surprised, that she had to point to him a second time.

Being chosen gave him an unusual spark of enthusiasm for the game, but even so he struck out three times, dropped a fly ball and missed two grounders.

“Sorry,” he said to her when the game was over. “I guess I let you down.”

“Nah, I like losing fourteen to nothing. But you can make up for it by buying me a root beer after school.”

“I'd really like to but I've got a lesson. I could give you the money and you could buy one yourself.”

“Don't be a jerk. What kind of lesson?”

Jeremiah hesitated. “Ballroom dancing.”

“Boy,” Luella said, “you need me even worse than I thought.”

Luella's own family lived in a perfectly nice if rather small house, and Luella took the Number 6 bus to school. Jeremiah had never taken a bus anywhere. He envied her independence.

When he took Luella to his house for the first time, she said, “Wow! Is that a real elevator? You're not just rich. You're
stinking
rich!”

The great thing about Luella was that she didn't care. Yes, when she came over she was happy to cannonball into the pool, or try to hit tennis balls over the net with her eyes closed, or throw balls down the private bowling alley while hopping on one foot. She even liked the swans in the moat. Jeremiah was afraid of getting too close because they hissed at him, but Luella just hissed back, flapping her arms.

But she was just as happy to have Jeremiah come to her house, where they played Monopoly, read comic books, tried to stand on their heads, or walked to the corner store for a Popsicle.

Sometimes Jeremiah wished that he were more like Luella. He wished that he could do things without having to think about them for so long, weighing the pros and cons. That he didn't care what other people thought of him.

Luella wore one bright yellow and one striped sock to school because she felt like it. She stood up and told the math teacher, Mr. Mickelweiss, that putting questions on a test based on work they hadn't studied wasn't fair. She tobogganed backwards down the school hill, singing the Fernwood anthem in Pig Latin.

Jeremiah wished that he too could be brave and imaginative and even just a little bit wild.

•••

AT FERNWOOD
Academy, students were expected to be of sound mind and sound body. So once a season Jeremiah had to endure the school-wide cross-country run.

Being just outside the city limits, the academy was surrounded by fields of wheat, barley and corn. It was well into autumn, and the remaining stalks in the harvested fields had turned dry and brittle.

The students began in a crowded pack, but soon the faster runners pulled ahead. The slowest lagged behind, and the rest spread out somewhere in the middle.

Jeremiah and Luella always ran together. The truth, Jeremiah knew, was that Luella was a much faster runner than he was — one of the fastest in the school.

Jeremiah wasn't only slow. He also tired quickly. Learning the fox trot hadn't helped much with his stamina. But Luella stayed with him because she was his friend.

The two of them ran together, Jeremiah moaning about a stitch in his side, or his ankle hurting, or feeling like he was going to faint or die. Fortunately, Luella was a very patient friend.

Jeremiah gasped, “I can't make it. I think I'm going to barf.”

“Oh, come on,” Luella said, bouncing on her toes. “We're not even half way.”

“I feel woozy. I might pass out any minute.”

Luella rolled her eyes. “Okay, stop whin-ing. I know a shortcut. Through that field. Then we can rest until the others catch up.”

“You…saved…my…life…” Jeremiah wheezed.

The old farmhouse looked abandoned, the fence knocked down in several places and an upper window broken. Here and there weeds sprouted from the damp ground.

Jeremiah stepped in a muddy puddle, splashing his leg.

“Yuck. This mud smells awful. For all I know it's pig poo — ”

Something made him hush up.

Music. It seemed to be coming from the front of the farmhouse.

It wasn't like anything Jeremiah had ever heard before, a captivating rhythm of plucked notes and sudden strums, melody and rhythm.

Jeremiah and Luella looked at one another and slowed to a walk. The music played on. It sounded weirdly old and jumpily alive at the same time. And as they came around the corner of the house, they heard singing.

Shady Grove, my little love, Shady Grove I say,

Shady Grove, my little love, I'm bound to go away.

Luella put her hand on Jeremiah's arm.

“Let's get out of here,” she whispered. “We're trespassing. It might be an angry farmer with a shotgun.”

“Since when were you ever afraid of anything? Besides, that doesn't sound like a shotgun.”

It wasn't that Jeremiah felt brave. He just couldn't stop himself, for the music drew him on. It galloped through him like a heartbeat.

He kept walking toward the front of the house. Luella slowly followed.

As the music grew louder, he saw a man sitting on the porch's weathered steps.

He was an elderly black man, tall and slim, with a moustache. His steel-gray hair was trimmed short. He wore a white shirt with a pinstriped vest. His trousers were pulled up at the knees, showing his argyle socks and well-polished shoes. His suit jacket had been folded and laid neatly over the porch rail.

One shoe tapped lightly as he played on the instrument that rested on his right knee, the narrow neck stretched up into his left hand.

Jeremiah knew it was a banjo, even though he had only seen one in a movie or maybe in a cartoon. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. It had an elegant neck with a design of vines and leaves on the fingerboard that shone as if it were made of pearls. It had a round body made of some dark, highly polished wood. Stretched over the round body was a kind of drumhead that was held tight with silver-colored clamps.

Jeremiah watched the man play. The swift fingers of his left hand pressed the strings. His right did the complicated picking or strumming or whatever it was, using his fingers and his thumb.

Jeremiah felt something stronger than he'd ever felt in his life. He felt a desire — no, more than a desire, a
need
— to be able to make music like that.

The man looked up and half nodded at them. He sang another verse, his voice a little raspy. He played the melody one more time and finished with a final strum.

He looked at them again and smiled.

“Good day,” he said.

“Hi. That was cool,” Luella said.

“Well, thank you.”

“We'd better get back to school. Come on, Jeremiah.”

She yanked his hand, but Jeremiah didn't budge. He just stood there as if he was frozen, or paralyzed, or had been turned into a zombie.

“Do you live here?” he said at last.

“No, nobody does anymore. But I grew up here. We moved away when I was small. Haven't been around for years. But I had a business appointment in town and thought I'd pass by.”

“I know that's a banjo,” said Jeremiah, “but what kind of music were you playing?”

“I don't know if there's exactly a name for it. These days most people just call it ‘old time.' It used to be played on the farms and in the countryside eighty years ago or more.”

“Is it black people's music?”

“Jeremiah, you can't ask that!” Luella said.

“No, it's a good question,” the man said. “In fact, the banjo is based on instruments played in Africa. The slaves first played them in America. Later the white people took them up, too. The music got all mixed together. By now I'd call it everybody's music.”

The man stood up. He put the banjo into a case that Jeremiah hadn't noticed before. He was sorry to see it disappear.

“We're supposed to be running,” Luella said. “We'd better get going.”

“Nice to have met you,” the man said. He picked up the banjo case and came down the porch stairs and went round the side of the house. Jeremiah heard a car start up. A few moments later he saw it moving along the dirt road. He watched as it got smaller.

“We're going to be last!” Luella said, starting to run.

Jeremiah reluctantly looked away from the car, and turned to follow her.

Not a Joke

“
WHAT DID YOU SAY?
” Jeremiah's mother's voice screeched as it rose.

They were sitting in the formal dining room. His father sat at one end of the long table and his mother sat at the other, with Jeremiah in the middle. He had trouble seeing either of his parents because of the two candelabras on the table blocking his view. Two servants dressed in medieval tunics and leggings stood with silver platters, ready to offer second helpings of the evening meal. There was duck à l'orange, potato croquettes and asparagus in cream sauce.

“I think,” said Jeremiah's father, winking at his son, “that our Jeremiah is making a joke. The banjo! That's very good. Ha-ha! The next thing we know you'll be walking around in overalls and bare feet with straw stuck between your teeth. You'll be saying ‘Howdy' and eating flapjacks.”

Jeremiah looked down at the untouched food on his plate. This wasn't going to be easy.

“You always go on about how music is important, don't you? Well, I looked it up and you're absolutely right. It helps develop the brain. Music uses the left frontal cortex and the right cerebellum. And you know what? Musicians even have a more developed corpus callosum. Pretty impressive, huh?”

“Now, Jeremiah, there is music and there is
music.
Classical music is sophisticated. It's subtle and intellectual and challenging. You're already studying the piano. You've got a Hoosendorfer Deluxe Concert Grand to play on, the most expensive piano in the world. And even then we have to beg you to practice.”

“Exactly!” cried Jeremiah. “Because I'm not interested in the piano. And I'm not interested in Beethoven or Mozart or Scarlatti, either. There's nothing wrong with classical music except that it's not for me. The music I heard...it was like…whirling in a field or jumping into a pond or…oh, I don't know. Please let me get a banjo. I've got more than enough money in my own bank account. In fact, I've got enough to buy a hundred banjos.”

“Do you hear this, Albert?” said Jeremiah's mother. “Everything we've worked for. All those years of striving to make a better life. And our only son wants to throw it all away and…and play the banjo! It's just too much.”

Jeremiah watched as his mother put her hand to her forehead and leaned back in her chair.

“Do you see how you've upset your mother?” said his father. “Jeremiah, I'm sorry. But we have to do what we think is best for you. We forbid you to buy a banjo. Now let that be the end of the discussion. And have some of this delicious duckling. It was imported from France and cost a small fortune.”

•••

BUT JEREMIAH
didn't forget about the man playing the banjo. He couldn't forget. He heard the rhythm of the music in the click of his bicycle wheels as he rode around the grounds. He caught the melody in the raindrops tapping the window of his room.

One night he dreamed that he was walking in a giant field of wheat. In the distance he could see a single tree with great overhanging branches. He began to walk toward it. As he got closer he saw banjos hanging from the tree like ripe fruit. But when he reached up, the tree's branches pulled away just as his fingers brushed them.

Not being allowed to buy a banjo didn't mean that Jeremiah couldn't
learn
about banjo music. He had his own internet music account, and his parents allowed him to buy and download whatever he wanted. He loaded his player with recordings by musicians with names like Clarence Ashley and Dink Roberts and Roscoe Holcomb, who were long dead. And with new musicians, too.

Each had his or her own peculiar style. Sometimes the banjo rang out like bells and sometimes it slurred like a blues guitar and sometimes it rattled like a drum full of gravel.

Jeremiah couldn't get enough of it. In the back of the limousine, lounging in the living room while his parents talked about how to reach the Asian dental-floss market, lying on his king-sized bed, his ears would be filled with the sound of banjo.

All this listening made Jeremiah happy, for he had found a sound that matched his own inner music. But it also filled him with a painful yearning. Listening wasn't enough. He would feel his own fingers moving in time, his left hand pretending to fret the fingerboard, his right plucking invisible strings.

“Enough with the air banjo,” Luella said to him one day. “You are becoming a total bore.” Jeremiah was lying on his back on the gravel of the tennis court, his hands moving while Luella sat beside him. “You don't want to watch a movie. You don't want to raft-surf in the pool or sneak up on the flamingos or do somersaults down the bowling alley. You don't want to play killer tennis.”

“The last time we played killer tennis,” said Jeremiah, “I threw the racket into my mother's eighteenth-century Italian birdbath.”

Luella picked up a handful of gravel and slowly poured it onto Jeremiah's shirt.

“Hey!” He sat up.

“Oh, look. He's alive.”

Jeremiah sighed. “I'm sorry. I know. But I can't help it.”

“Well, we're just going to have to do something about this, aren't we?” said Luella. “It's going to be impossible to hang around with you until you learn to play the banjo. And you can't learn unless you have one.”

“I already told you. My parents won't let me buy one.”

“Then there's got to be some other solution. You know a lot about banjos already, right?”

“I guess.”

“Didn't you tell me that in the old days a lot of poor people living in the country used to play them?”

“Sure.”

“Well, if they were poor, how did they get banjos?”

“I don't know. They made them, I think.”

“Now we're getting somewhere. Your parents didn't forbid you to
make
one, did they?”

“Well, no.” Jeremiah frowned. “But how can I make one? I've never made anything in my life except that key rack in shop class last year. And you know how that came out. I don't have the slightest idea how to make a banjo. I don't have instructions. I can't use tools — ”

“Stop right now, Jeremiah Birnbaum!” said Luella in her best schoolteacher voice. “All I hear is
I can't, I can't, I can't.
Do you think that's what the Wright brothers said before they built their airplane? Or what Louis Pasteur said before he invented moisturizing?”

“Pasteurizing.”

“Whatever. The point is there's a first time for everything. Now are you just going to sit there? Or are you going to build yourself a stupid banjo?”

Jeremiah looked at Luella. His eyes grew wide.

“Come on!” he said.

For the first time ever, Luella had trouble keeping up with Jeremiah. He sprinted out of the tennis court and wound through the maze with its ten-foot-high hedges. He hurled himself under the waterfall and leapt over the miniature train that chugged through the tropical flower garden.

At last he skidded through the side door of the house and raced past the cook, who brandished a dripping spoon at him. He flew up the back staircase to the third floor. He ran down the hall, slid around the corner and threw himself into his enormous leather desk chair.

His computer flickered to life.

Jeremiah and Luella looked at the screen as he started to search the internet. They saw pictures of banjos — fancy banjos all carved and decorated with inlay, and banjos that were plain as could be. They found pictures of banjos played during the American Civil War, and banjos recently made in a factory.

And they found homemade banjos. Banjos made a hundred years ago and banjos made just yesterday.

“Look at that one,” Jeremiah said. “It says the builder stretched the skin of a groundhog over the drum part. Am I going to have to hunt a large rodent and kill it?”

“If it was a contest between you and the groundhog, I'd bet on the groundhog,” Luella said. “Let's keep looking. How come it has that peg or tuner or whatever part way down the neck?”

“That's the fifth string,” Jeremiah said. “The drone string. You pluck it with your thumb. It's one of the things that makes the banjo unique.”

“Wait,” Luella said. “That one.” She pointed to the screen.

The banjo that Luella pointed to was about the plainest there was. It had a very simple headstock. It had a flat neck without any frets — the thin metal strips where a person pressed his fingers to get the right note. But Jeremiah knew that banjos in the old days didn't have frets. Some of the players he listened to played without them. He liked the way they could slide their fingers to make the notes bend up or down.

The banjo Luella pointed at also had a body made out of a cookie tin.

A
cookie tin
? It was hard to believe. But a tin was round like the body of a banjo. Instead of a stretched skin, the bridge rested on the back of the tin.

It seemed a little weird, but at least he wouldn't have to kill a groundhog.

“I think — maybe — I could make a banjo like that,” Jeremiah said.