The Piano Six Men Carried Home

Walt Hendricks

The shop sat on a gravel road twenty-two miles northeast of Dunmore, at the end of a driveway lined with hay bales and old plow disks painted white.

It was a steel building with a tin roof and two overhead doors, and a hand-lettered sign over the office that said Hendricks Welding. I parked beside a red Ford with a flatbed trailer behind it.

Walt came out wiping his hands on a rag. He was sixty-three, thick through the shoulders, with the burn scars of a lifetime of arc work up both forearms, white and shiny like melted candle wax.

His wife Tracy waved from the kitchen window of the little house across the yard. He said, “Come on in, it’s in the back.”

The upright stood in the corner of the shop, away from the grinders, wrapped to the shoulders in a quilted moving blanket with the lid up. A girl of about eight, with a ponytail and a missing front tooth, was picking out a single note over and over.

“That’s my granddaughter Katie,” Walt said. “I got it for her lessons. Seventy-five dollars! I thought somebody had made a mistake. Tracy said I better go before they noticed.”

“Walt,” I said. “I need to tell you whose piano it is.”

I told him. I told him about the egg money in the Folgers can, and about 1962, and about the hymns before dawn that nobody was supposed to hear.

I did not tell it well. My voice kept dropping out on me. I stood in a welding shop that smelled of cutting oil and hot metal, and told two strangers about my grandmother’s mornings.

Walt listened with his arms folded. When I said “broken hip,” he unfolded them. When I said “Saturday,” he took off his cap and held it against his chest.

“Katie,” he said. “Come here a minute.”

Katie slid off the stool and came across the concrete. She looked up at me, and she was not a bit afraid, the way eight-year-olds aren’t.

“Is the lady’s grandma coming home?”

“Saturday,” I said.

“And the piano was her friend?”

I almost lost it right there. “Yes. I think it was.”

Katie thought about this seriously. She looked at the piano, and at her grandfather, and back at me.

“Then she needs it more than I do,” she said. “I can play at Mrs. Foss’s on Thursdays. She has a keyboard.”

I had the cash in my purse, four hundred dollars, in twenties, from the account I had been saving for a used truck. I held it out.

“No,” Walt said. “I’ll take my seventy-five back. That’s the fair price.”

“It isn’t. You paid a boy to load it. You put new casters on. You bought a pad for the bench, I saw it on the stool. And you drove half this county looking for a piano for your granddaughter.”

“That’s my business.”

“I know. Take it anyway.”

He looked at the money a long time. He did not take it. Then Katie tugged his sleeve, and he took the money. He folded the twenties into his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap.

“My trailer’s yours,” he said. “I’ll haul it, I’ll strap it, I’ll bring the blankets. But you listen to me. That thing weighs near five hundred pounds, and your grandmother has a step-up porch. You’ll need more than me.”

“I know.”

“How many?”

I did the math the way I had done it in the car. “Six.”

“Six,” he agreed. “And somebody young enough to do what the old ones say.”

Katie had one more thing, and she said it with great seriousness, hands behind her back like she was giving a report.

“You have to tell her the C sticks. So she doesn’t think it’s her.”

I told her I would. Then I went out to the car and cried for three minutes with the engine off, and Tracy watched me from the window and had the sense not to come out.