I Was There the Night He Died (14 page)

“You're welcome.”

We both stare at Samantha's new paper shredder.

“I'm going to get high,” she says.

“I think that's a very good idea.”

While Samantha settles back on the couch and pulls out her weed and rolling papers, I turn up the thermostat. “I think I told you I got the heat turned back on,” I say. “You can take your coat off if you want.” I know I've said what I shouldn't have said as soon as I say it. The whole point of inviting her over is to subtly coax her into talking about the scars I saw, so appearing as if I'm trying to sweat her out of her coat in order to expose the evidence is the wrong move. I won't be surprised if she flees me again.

Instead, “You told me. But why did you do it? I thought you didn't want to feel too settled.”

“The real estate agent said I needed to if she's going to be able to sell the house.”

“Was that the blonde in the red minivan?”

“Aren't you ever at school?”

“When I need to be.” Samantha slips the readied joint between her lips; makes it crackle alive with the flame from her lighter and a sharp intake of breath that turns the joint's end orange, expert stoner alchemy.

“Speaking of,” I say. “What universities did you apply to?” If the front door to the present is presently off limits, maybe I can bluff my way in through the back.

“How do you know I applied to any?”

Because you're eighteen years old and living in Chatham, Ontario, with your drunk of a father and your fourteen-year-old brother. Because when I was your age and living in Chatham, Ontario, I couldn't wait to leave, had literally worn out the guidance office's copy of the University of Toronto calendar, the once-glossy cover thumbed dull and the endlessly turned pages falling out by the time my acceptance letter finally arrived in the mail in the spring.

“Okay,” I say. “
Have
you applied to any universities?”

“I've applied to a few.”

“You don't sound too excited.”

“I never said I was.”

“Don't you think you should be?”

“I don't know. Should I?”

Instead of beginning,
When I was your age …
, “Is U of T one of them?” I ask.

“One of the ones I applied to?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't think so.”

“You don't
think
so?”

“I can't remember. It was like three months ago when I filled out the form.”

“I know, but … ” But now I'm starting to understand why your right hand has sprouted an extra appendage in the form of the joint that's perpetually stuck there and why you may very well have self-inflicted cut wounds on your arms. “But you should have applied to U of
T as well. For one thing, you'd love Toronto.”

“I told you, I'm from Toronto.”

“Right, I forgot.” Forgot that Oakville still spells Toronto to her, the latter of which she really would love once she got to know it: antiquarian bookstores with signed Virginia Woolfs and Jack Kerouacs and Walt Whitmans you could never afford to buy but it's thrilling all the same just to know that someone in your very own city can and will; Nigerian taxi drivers who listen to the BBC World News in their cabs and who can make sound arguments for Canada's military withdrawal from the world stage; wonderfully crazy street scholars running around town armed with thick black markers correcting the spelling and grammatical mistakes of their fellow graffitists; a city, in short, too expensive, too crowded, too stuck up, and much too much alive for you to risk missing out on being alive there and being a part of it all.

Instead of saying any of this, though, I tell her how big U of T is and how it can offer so many different kinds of programs and courses and how its library is the nation's largest and how much money it has for scholarships and guest speakers and how many well-known writers and thinkers and scientists are part of its alma mater. I also tell her how even my mum was happy I was going away to university, just not so happy that the university turned out to be in Toronto, not after she and my father helped me move into residence, the first time in the big city for any of us. The ego-dwarfing buildings; the undeniable energy in the streets; all of the people who didn't look like her—none of this boded well for her only baby boy.
It smells like curry
, she said once we'd gotten me settled in my room.
What does?
I said.
Everything
, she said.

“Okay, okay,” Samantha says. “Enough with the hard sell. You made your point. I'll add it to the stupid list.”

“If it's not too late. You need to talk to your guidance counsellor.”

“Okay, I will.”

“Right away. It might be too late.”

“All right, all right.” She relights her joint; inhales; exhales. “So,” she says. “Who died tonight?”

So why do you have cuts all down your arm? I want to answer. I realize I have no idea what I'm doing, that I'm in way over my head. There were good reasons, after all, besides ecological farsightedness and simple personal selfishness why Sara and I never had children. I'm in the story business, I'll tell her a story, that might make her feel better. Will certainly make me feel better.

“John Hartford died tonight,” I say. “But this one has a happy ending, I promise. If John Hartford's music was about anything, it was happiness. Except that's not the right word—happiness isn't a big enough word.
Joy
. John Hartford's music was about joy.
Is
about joy, I mean. Is.”

I sit down on the other end of the couch, lean back for the long haul; the living as well as the dead are counting on me this time.

“John Hartford was born in New York in 1937 to a prominent surgeon and his wife, but grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where he worked on the Mississippi River as a teenager and listened to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, Earl Scrugg's brand-new three-finger banjo playing technique the road to Damascus sound that got him walking on his life's plucking path. By the age of thirteen he was an accomplished fiddler and banjo player and led his own high-school bluegrass band.”

“I bet that got him a lot of action.”

My instinct is to dismiss her sass with a choice anecdote about Hartford's late-'60s Hollywood lady's man days, but then I remember that his song “The First Girl I Loved” was written about his cousin. I motion for the joint instead so she'll feel like I'm with her, not against her; puff, pass it back. I'll have to work fast, will have to talk Hartford back to life before the fervour-flattening effect of the pot takes hold.

“He dropped out of university, he worked as a disc jockey, he played in country and western bands for drunks and tips, and he began writing songs that were one part bluegrass, one part Beatles, one part post-beatnik wit and wisdom, and in 1966 he signed with RCA and came up with his first album,
John Hartford
Looks at Life
. The six records he made for RCA over the next five years are lovely and funny and never less than inimitably hummy, but can't help being what they are: albums recorded for a major record label in the late 1960s by a very idiosyncratic musician and songwriter who nonetheless was recording for a major record label in the late 1960s.” Samantha offers me the joint; I don't want it, but I take it, toke, hand it back. “There's no such thing as revolution from within. If you lie down with dogs, you're going to get fleas.”

“There are dogs who would find that offensive, I bet.”

“No doubt.”

I lean even further back and sink into the couch as deep as I can; here comes the important part, the part Samantha needs to hear. That everyone needs to hear.

“The first song on side two of Hartford's second album is a song called ‘Gentle on My Mind,' which Glen Campbell heard and thought was catchier than the flu and could be a hit if sufficiently polished and pimped, and he was right—it won four Grammies and went on to become one of the most widely recorded songs of all time. More important though than helping to serenade elevators and dentists' offices around the world were the royalties it brought in that allowed Hartford to quit his various day jobs and leave L.A. and move to a home in Tennessee on the Cumberland River and make the kind of music he'd begun to hear in his head. He hired the best pickers around—Vassar Clements on fiddle, Tut Taylor on dobro, Norman Blake on guitar—and in 1971 created
Aereo-Plain
, which sounds like smoking hash out of an old corncob pipe, or, if you prefer, Paul McCartney being molested by Flatt and Scruggs.”

“I don't. I definitely don't prefer.”

“Smoking hash out of an old corncob pipe it is then.”

“Translation, please.”

“Meaning that the album begins with a faithful version of its only cover tune—‘Turn Your Radio On,' an old gospel call-to-angelic-arms song—before sneaking into ‘Steamboat Whistle Blues,' another verse-verse-chorus corker delivered pickin' and strummin' style but which, if you stop humming long enough to really listen, isn't just some old-timey sing-a-long but is actually about how the food we eat is processed and the news we're allowed to hear is processed and the buildings we live in all look the same and that the only thing you can trust these days is an antebellum steamboat plodding off down the river. This is post-Manson-murder music—wilted flower-power music—made by a hippie with a head on his shoulders, somebody who knows that to forget the past is just as foolish as being afraid of the future. Hand me that joint, will you?” I'm almost at the finish line; nothing can slow me down now.

“Maybe you should slow down,” Samantha says. She's looking at me like Sara used to look at me when the words couldn't come fast enough to say all they had to say.

“I thought you hated mellow,” I say.

“In moderation.”

Taking the joint from her, “You know what William Blake said about moderation.”

“Hold on. Is that this Hartford guy's guitar player?”

“Now that would be a duo that even Lennon and McCartney would have had a hard time competing with.” I only take a quick hit before handing it right back.

“And because it didn't matter anymore if
Billboard
magazine liked it or not or whether he ever got invited to perform on
Hee Haw
,
Aereo-Plain
could comfortably be what it wanted to be: full of songs about falling in love with first cousins and being too dope-paranoid to talk on the telephone and the insanity of modern urban planning and the enduring value of friendship and family and wide open spaces and even acapella odes to the wonderful word ‘boogie.'”

“You're kidding, right?”

“Why would I kid around about something like that?” Her joint has gone out now, but she makes no move to relight it. She's listening.

“
Morning Bugle
came next and was much the spectacular same, while 1976's
Mark Twang
was just like it sounds, with the added aural oddity of Hartford accompanying himself alone on banjo or fiddle or whatever other instrument the tune at hand required—on one song it's just him and his cheek—plus, for rhythmical accompaniment, periodic clogging.”

“Pardon my ignorance, but—”

“But what's clogging?” I'm on my feet and approximating Hartford's stylish stomping before her sentence is finished. Still moving my feet, “Hartford and his wife and a driver who doubled as the sound man would tour all over North America by this time on a bus with just his banjo and fiddle and guitar and a four foot by eight foot piece of A-grade plywood that he'd use for clogging.” I stop, but don't sit back down. “And keep this in mind: everyone goes on and on about the Sex Pistols' album being such a punk watershed, about how its aesthetic is so raw and primitive and DIY. But Steve Jones laid down
weeks
of electric guitar overdubs on that thing and its budget came in at well over a hundred grand. Compared to
Mark Twang
, which was released a whole year earlier,
Never Mind the Bollocks
sounds like L.A. session hacks backed up by the London Philharmonic.”

I realize I'm standing in the middle of the living room. I'm a little uncomfortable, just like you always are when you tell someone the truth.

“So he was married?”

“Happily. For many, many years.”

“And he didn't shoot heroin into his eyeball or anything?”

“Enjoyed a quality puff and the occasional pint of cider, but nothing that didn't make the music sound better and every moment more alive.”

“He doesn't sound like he was too concerned with being a neglected genius or whatever.”

“Was too busy having a good time to worry too much about it, I guess.”

I'm suddenly very tired, like after an hour of good love making or like coming back to your own bed after a pleasant but long trip. In spite of the furnace blowing out warm air, Samantha still has her jacket on, but at some point she's taken off her running shoes and tucked her feet underneath her on the couch. She looks sleepy too. Then she doesn't; looks instead like she's just woken up late for an important exam and there's no way she's going to make it in time.

“What happened to him?” she says.

“You know what happened to him.”

She looks at me; I look at the floor.

“Why?” she says.

“Why what?”

“Why does every story have to end this way?”

“I don't know. They just do.”

“No they don't.”

“Yeah, they do.”

Neither of us says anything else or even moves—is ever going to move. They're going to find us here in the spring in these exact same positions. I look up.

“When Hartford's widow gave the mortician the bag containing the suit she wanted him buried in, somehow his prized Batman cape got mixed up in there. The mortician was obviously a little surprised when he opened up the bag at the funeral home, but figured that since the deceased was an artist, it was probably what his widow wanted. People showed up for the viewing the next day and were understandably a little taken aback, but Hartford's widow took one look and laughed. “Leave it,” she said. “John would have loved it.'”