The Music My Neighbor Would Not Turn Down

I will tell you what I wanted to do. I wanted to buy a bigger system than his and point it at his house and give him back every night he had taken, double. I sat up two nights planning it. And it was Hannah, of all the tired people in Tennessee, who talked me out of it. She said, Wade, if you do that, Roy does not sleep either. And Eli bangs his head. And the Tedders. You would be doing to all of them the thing you hate him for doing. She said, you can not fix his meanness by being mean to everybody.

She was right, and I hated that she was right, and I did not have a better plan. So for about ten more days we just endured. The music went every night. I stopped going over because it only fed him. I started to think there was nothing to do but wait him out or move, and we could not afford to move.

And then the weather did the thing I could not.

It was a Friday night in the first week of August, hot and swollen the way it gets right before the sky lets go, and the radio out of Nashville had been saying all day that a line of storms was coming through after dark, the straight-line wind kind. By nine it was lightning off to the west, that heat lightning that does not even bother to thunder yet, and by ten the first front hit the lane and the tops of the big hackberries along the creek started whipping.

Chet, naturally, had people over. Storm did not slow him down. If anything the system was louder, like he was trying to out-shout the sky. Around eleven the real wind came, and the rain came sideways, and the power blinked and went out all up and down the lane the way it does out here, where we are the last ones the electric company thinks about. Our whole lane went black. All of it except Chet’s, because Chet had a big generator for his shop, so while the rest of us sat in the dark with our candles and our scared kids, across the lane Chet’s garage stayed lit up like a stage and the music never even stuttered. There was something about that that I will not forget, all of us dark and him lit up and loud, like it was a picture somebody painted to show you exactly who he was.

Then, a little after midnight, over the top of the music, we heard the crack.

It is a sound you know if you live under big trees. A limb going. This was not a limb, it was most of a hackberry, a widow-maker the size of a telephone pole, and the wind laid it right across the lane down by the creek slab, across the only way in or out. We heard it come down and we heard it hit and we heard, a few seconds later, Chet’s music get turned off.