The Boy Who Raked Nine Yards

He said he wanted to do it himself, so I sat in the car with the heater running and watched through the window.

I saw him lay the money on the counter. I saw Abner count it.

I saw Abner go to the window and lift the guitar off its hook, and turn around, and hand it to my son across the counter with both hands.

Rowan held it the way you would hold a baby. He did not even strum it. He just held it.

Then I saw Abner reach under the counter and set down a little paper package and a guitar strap, an old brown leather one. Rowan shook his head and Abner pushed them across to him anyway.

When Rowan came out, he was carrying the guitar in front of him like it might break.

He got in the car and set it across his lap and said, “Mama, he gave me new strings and a strap. He said they came in with a guitar ten years ago and nobody ever wanted them.”

I do not believe for one minute that strap came in with a guitar ten years ago. But I did not say so.

“He showed me how to tune it, too,” Rowan said. “He said the old strings are dead and I should change them this week. He said to come back if I can’t get them on right.”

That Sunday at church, Rowan brought Ivo’s little guitar back to him in its old cloth case.

Ivo is eighty-four, a retired railroad brakeman who plays bass at the Sunday night singing, and he has hands like baseball mitts.

Rowan handed it to him and said, “Thank you for letting me use it, Mr. Ivo. I got my own now.”

Ivo took it and looked at Rowan a long time, and I saw his chin go. He asked Rowan if he had learned a whole song yet. Rowan said not yet, just pieces.

So after the morning service, while the ladies were setting out dinner in the fellowship hall, Ivo sat on a folding chair with Rowan’s new guitar and showed him three chords.

G, C and D. He showed him where his fingers went and how to change from one to the next without looking.

“That’s three chords,” Ivo said, handing it back. “That’s half the hymns in that book and most of the songs on the radio. You learn those and you’ll never be without music the rest of your life.”

Rowan practiced every day that week. He practiced before school, and after school, and in the evening until I made him stop so the neighbors could sleep.

He changed the strings himself on Thursday. He broke the high one and had to go back to Abner’s for another, and Abner sold it to him for a quarter, which I do not think is what a guitar string costs either.

The next Sunday after church, it was cold and sunny again. I was sitting on our front steps in my coat, drinking coffee, watching the light come down the mountain, when Rowan came out with his guitar and sat down two steps below me.