The Blue Moon Review - Previews

B M R

from Music of the Inner Lakes
excerpt from "Music of the Inner Lakes"

by Roger Sheffer

For a long time I held my left hand in a fist. I held my right hand in a fist, too, as if to protect it from what had happened to the left--that day in the Silver Lake store when my cousin asked, "How thin do you want your turkey?" and I said, "I don't know." A careless gesture, bright blade spinning, the upper joints of my ring and pinkie fingers suddenly disconnected, suspended in air above the slicer, then dropping into a pool of blood.

After five years of self-pity, I opened both fists and gave serious thought to playing guitar again. I reversed the strings and began to re-train my left hand as the picking hand, stood in front of the mirror, made myself dizzy, then tried it again with my eyes closed. No music. That was in July. The guitar sat in its case now, a shadowy figure propped against the wall, pin-headed, bottom-heavy, the only guest in the cottage--and not a happy one. Eventually I would reverse the strings back to their normal sequence and make do with the chords that could be held down with two fingers, get the thumb involved by reaching around to the sixth string. This may sound like the work of a contortionist, but after all, wasn't there an armless woman in Tennessee who played guitar with her toes?

"Such a coward," my cousin said as she bagged my groceries--pre-sliced turkey sealed in plastic, rye bread, beer, pretzels, mayonnaise, canned goods. Last night, scared of rowing across the lake in the rain, I had missed the weekly folk concert at the town museum.

"And how were the fiddlers?"

"Absent. Sick. Food poisoning." Janine frowned at a can of chicken soup, unsure of the price or edibility, dropped it in my pack without ringing it into the register, kind of waving her hand over the keys as if to appease the god of commerce. "I wish you'd stop being a hermit and hook up your damn phone. When you don't show up on time for something, the first thing I assume is your boat sank." She squinted into a smile, the corner lines of her eyes forming perfect pie-cuts in her ruddy skin.

"It was supposed to rain."

"Went anyway. Hair gets wet, no big deal. I'm about ready to shave it all off, you know." She pulled the concert flyer from the side of the register, balled it up and tossed it in the trash, then clapped her hands, applauding either her good aim or the fact that the concert was over. "Other musicians came up and played, some bad, some good, if you trust my opinion. I took a blanket and sat on the lawn, no mosquitoes. And it didn't rain! At least not on our end of the lake. You would have loved it!" she shouted, almost singing. She slapped her left hand on the counter, kept a steady beat as she described the quartet who had come up on stage as the final act. "You just would have loved those people."

She was talking about the Meekers--locals, very backwoods, occasional store customers. Gas and cigarettes, kerosene in winter. Cash only. No food stamps. Too proud for that. They had a place twenty miles north of Silver Lake, on a desolate road named for the family. Father, mother, brother, sister, no instruments, folk performers of the most primitive kind, sorrowful, repetitive, shocking. They sang everything in octaves and fourths and fifths. "To this beat," Janine said, with a couple more slaps and a forceful stare. She should have recorded it on video. Half the show was how these Meekers looked, their heads stiff and eyes wide open, scared by their own music or by the horrors the music described. "Look how mad you are. Ha! You really missed something!"

I was mad, but I was also disgusted with myself, my failure to write any music for the past several years, the frustration of not being able to play. There was an inch of water in my boat, a soggy towel, a popsicle wrapper. I set the backpack on the rear seat and grabbed the oars. I looked at my fingers. There might be a song in the horrors of slicing off fingertips, but I would change the story and have it take place on a trail-less mountain, twenty miles from help: My lover was trimming my fingernails. The jackknife slipped.

Music was seeping back into my life, into the dry soil of neglect, the twisted roots of deprivation and self-pity. I felt this change and finally acted on it. The last concert evening of the summer, ninety percent chance of rain this time, I suddenly felt brave, rowed to the store, poked my head in and asked Janine if she'd go with me. She had overdue bills to pay, waved me out the door with a fly swatter. I drove six miles to the museum barn and sat on a bench and watched the fiddlers perform, a couple of old hippies, one with a long beard, the other ponytailed, as if to keep them straight for us. They were okay, although when they put down their instruments to sing, their voices tended to sag--under pitch, waterlogged, unblended on the back vowels, perhaps the lingering effect of that food poisoning. Folk singing doesn't have to be bad singing, off-pitch. I mean, it's supposed to sound good, and these guys didn't. We were relieved to go back to the lightness of their fiddling, the music lifting them off the floor, it seemed, high above us, this audience of twenty earthbound mortals who had come in out of the rain. I sat alone, cuddling my flask of rum. In my old singing days, I carried a flask inside my jacket and drank from it between numbers, to soothe the calluses on my throat, loosen the strings that rang in my head, a quarter tone sharp.

When the fiddlers had completed their set, the emcee invited audience members to come up and perform. "Hey, don't be shy, I know we got some fine singers out there!" I remained seated--I had not brought my guitar, couldn't play it anyway, and I had no songs. The music had dried out and all the words I had ever written were stranded in that dry streambed of my mind, like broken branches and dead fish.

So the Meekers made their entrance, unannounced, kind of shuffling and bumping into each other. I knew who they were without any introduction. It was warm that night, but they shivered. They hugged themselves and arranged their stiff bodies in a straight line, more than arm's length apart, as if spaced that way to do calisthenics. Or they might have been asking for new clothes. Look at us. This is all we own. The little girl had on pink shorts and a white T shirt, yard sale rejects. The other three were in jeans and flannel. The mother's hair was wet, flat, hacked. She had a bald spot. The two men seemed close enough in age to be brothers, shaped the same (left shoulder low, head tipped to the right), wearing identical gray baseball caps, bill forward. They set up a rhythm by slapping their thighs, and the little girl sang a few measures before the men came in with a nasal drone. Jesus this and Jesus that, and take me now, Lord Jesus. I had hoped for better. The mother clapped through most of these numbers, sang alto on choruses. They blended well, but the music was too gospel for me, too fiercely hopeful of salvation--which was what must have endeared them to Janine. Finally, the older of the two men cleared his throat and announced, "One more, everybody, then we'll scoot on home. It's called 'Don't Leave Me in the Snow,' and every word is true. Wrong time of year for a song like that, but maybe you'll feel it. If it's any good." He clapped a couple times, the girl started to sing, then he stopped her with a hand on the shoulder and said to the audience, "You're gonna want the background on this."

Roger Sheffer has been writing seriously since 1985. Before that he was a serious reader and an advocate of the short story, a course which he feels privileged to teach at Minnesota State University, Mankato, where he has been employed since 1980. He received his doctoral degree in comp theory from SUNY Albany in 1979.

Thanks to various choir directors, friends, and musical colleagues in Mankato, he has managed to maintain his interest in music, not just as a fan, but as an avid practitioner, of both classical and popular music — in fact, he has recently come out with a CD of what he loosely calls "folk music."

Outside of writing and music, he has a few other interests: bicycling, especially around Mankato, and life in the woods — in the Adirondack Mountains, where part of his family lives, and where he has the good fortune to spend at least a month every year.

Buy
Music of the Inner Lakes today from Amazon.com

Visit the New Rivers Press Website for more great titles

More BMR Authors' Books:

The Procession
by Theron Montgomery

Karaoke Funeral
by Tania Rochelle

The View from Tamischeira
by Richard Cumyn

Fizz
by Paul A. Toth

The Bestowing Sun
by Neil Grimmett

Making Scenes
by Adrienne Eisen

Small Boat with Oars of Different Size
by Thom Ward

Interesting Monsters
by Aldo Alvarez

The Gauguin Answer Sheet
by Dennis Finnell

Rosicrucian in the Basement
by Robert Sward

Bloodroot
by Aaron Roy Even

A Patrimony of Fishes
by Doug Lawson