The Music My Neighbor Would Not Turn Down

So that is how the morning came. The storm wore out around three and we all slept a few hours on the Tedders’ floor and in their chairs, the whole lane in one house, and at first gray light the men went out. Earl brought his old tractor down to the slab. Roy brought the chainsaw, and here is a small thing that was not small: it was Roy’s own chainsaw that Chet had borrowed back in June and never returned, and Roy had to go get it out of Chet’s own shed to cut the tree off the lane, and nobody said a word about it, but Chet saw it, Chet saw that saw in Roy’s hands, and I watched it land on him. Tyler and I worked the chain, and Chet got down in that cold muddy creek water up to his thighs and hooked Earl’s tractor to his own truck frame, and we all pulled it out together in the pink morning light, the whole lane of us, mud to the elbows, Chet’s forty-thousand-dollar truck coming up out of Dry Creek with a sound like the earth letting go of it.

When it was on dry gravel Chet stood there dripping and looked at all of us standing around him, the men he had never once helped with anything, who had just gotten up at dawn out of a storm to pull him out of a ditch, and he could not find anything big enough to say, so he just said thank you, to each one of us, by name, which meant he had learned our names, which he had never bothered to do before.

Here is the part that matters most, the part I would want you to carry out of this if you carry anything. The music never came back. Not that night. Not the next week. Not ever, the way it had been. The system came down out of the garage bay that same weekend. Chet still played a radio while he worked, a normal radio at a normal volume, and if he had buddies over it was done by ten, and more than once that fall I saw him glance across the lane toward our house and reach over and turn it down himself, without anybody asking, because he knew now, he knew there was a baby over here who needed to sleep, and an old man with a bad heart down the way, and a nurse who worked nights, and a little boy who could not take the noise, and an old soldier who had earned his quiet a long time ago. He knew who was on the lane. That was the whole difference. He had decided we did not matter, and one bad night in a creek had taught him we did, and you can not unlearn a thing like that.