The Pans I Carried to the Band

The Band Had Not Eaten

The band was called Sonny and the Switchgrass. That is a lot of name for four men and a girl who plays the upright bass.

They were a country outfit from over near Fayetteville. The fiddle player, Sonny, was the one my daddy had hired. Daddy heard him at a fish fry down in Ardmore and came home saying that man could make a fiddle cry like a widow.

Sonny was maybe sixty-five years old. He had driven two hours to get to us that afternoon.

He had played from six o’clock on. Through the first dance, the father-daughter dance, the dollar dance, all of it. And I realized, standing there holding the brisket, that I had not once seen a single one of those musicians set down an instrument to eat.

Not one of them. Not all night.

They had played straight through supper. That is what a hired band does.

The guests eat, and the band plays so there is music while the guests eat. Then the guests dance, and the band plays so there is music while the guests dance. The band does not get a plate. The band gets a check and a long drive home at midnight on an empty stomach.

I carried that brisket across the lot in my gown, in my stocking feet. The girl on the bass saw me coming and stopped playing. Then they all sort of trailed off, the way a band does when something is happening that they do not understand.

“Y’all eaten?” I said.

They looked at each other. The drummer was a young fellow, barely older than me. The guitar player had a gray beard down to his second shirt button. The bass girl shook her head a little, like she did not want to make trouble by admitting the truth.

“We’re alright, ma’am,” the guitar player said. “We’ll grab something on the way out.”

“On the way where?” I said. “Nothing’s open at midnight out here. You’d be lucky to find a gas station with the lights on.”

I set that pan of brisket down on the open tailgate of their van. I peeled the foil back right there.

The smell of it came up into the June night. Smoke and brown sugar and my mother’s two hands. I watched five grown musicians go quiet at the smell of it.

“This is my mama’s brisket,” I said. “She smoked it herself out behind the church. There is more food here tonight than four hundred people could eat.”

My voice went a little then, and I let it.

“I would be ashamed to my bones if the people who played my wedding went home hungry. So eat. Please. Eat.”