The Guitar They Laughed At
Delmar’s Porch
My grandfather Delmar raised me from the time I was nine, after my parents were killed on the county highway on a February night with black ice on it that nobody saw coming. He was already sixty then, a widower himself, running forty head of cattle on land that had been in our family since statehood, and he took in a grieving nine-year-old girl without one word of complaint that I ever heard, not once, not in all the years after.
Delmar taught guitar the way some men teach a trade, patiently, the same three chords every evening until my fingers stopped bleeding and started remembering. We sat on his back porch after supper, him on the good chair and me on the overturned bucket, while he walked me through the songs his own mother had taught him, hymns mostly, plus one he’d written himself during his years in the service and never would explain the full story behind, except to say it was about a friend he’d lost and a promise he’d made.
He played that hymnal service at Loyal Creek Baptist for over thirty years, and he led singing most Saturdays at the VFW hall too, back when the post still ran its own gospel hour before the Saturday supper. Half the older people in this county learned “Just As I Am” and a dozen other hymns from Delmar’s guitar before they ever heard them from an organ.
He died six years ago in the spring, quietly, in his sleep, in the house he’d raised me in. I inherited the house, the forty acres, and the guitar, in that order of what people assumed mattered most. I was wrong about which one mattered most. I just didn’t know it yet.
I put that guitar in its case the week of his funeral and did not open it again. Music had become the thing that hurt too much to touch, the sound of a porch that didn’t have him sitting on it anymore. I told myself I was too busy, working, raising Arvid alone, and that was true, but it also wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth was that I was afraid of exactly what happened the night I finally opened that case again in front of two hundred strangers.