The Piano Six Men Carried Home

Friday

The Friday I will keep for the rest of my life was the clearest afternoon of the fall.

The maples along the county road had come all the way in, orange and red and a yellow that almost hurt, and the gravel was white with dust, and the sky had a hard blue edge to it. At a quarter to two, Walt backed his flatbed trailer into the yard with the piano riding under a blanket, strapped down at four corners.

Grant’s truck came next. Then Orin’s, Otis’s, Larry’s, and a minute later Gus’s, a white Chevy with a church bulletin still on the dash.

They got out one at a time into the yard, six men in flannel shirts, plaid vests and work jackets, most of them in ball caps, John Deere green and feed store red and one that said Dunmore Co-op. No speeches. A few nods.

Floyd got out last, leaned his cane on the trailer fender, and surveyed the porch steps like a man appraising a bull.

“Three,” he said. “I counted.”

“It’s three,” I said.

“Then I’m in.”

I stood on the top step in my green sweater, because it was the only place I could see all six of them at once. My hair was down and the wind kept blowing it across my face. My hands wouldn’t stay still.

Gus took charge without seeming to. “Grant, Orin, take the heavy end. Otis and Larry, the sides. Floyd, you take the light corner and set the pace. Walt, you stay on the trailer and call the angle from the yard.”

“I set the pace?” Floyd said.

“You’re the man who says when we rest.”

“Well, I can do that,” Floyd said, satisfied.

They lifted the piano off the trailer by hand, as if it were something they respected. For a second nobody breathed. Five hundred pounds of dark stained wood, with a brass pedal and an ivory key that had been cracked since the Eisenhower years.

They carried it across the yard, over the grass, to the bottom step.

“Left side up a hair,” Gus said. “Orin, watch your toes.”

“They’re not mine, they’re the Lord’s,” Orin said, and somebody laughed, and the laugh ran through them like a wave.

They went up one step at a time. Lift, set. Lift, set. The only sound was boots on the porch boards, and the creak of the old rail, and Gus’s voice saying “Easy, easy, easy.”

At the top, Floyd said, “Rest.” They rested. He looked at the doorway with one eye shut, the way a man measures a gate.

“You’ve got an inch each side,” he said. “You’ll make it. But the left hand is going to want to cheat.”

They did not cheat. They walked the piano through the front door with an inch on both sides and the dust of sixty years lifting around it in the sun, and into the front room, and over the bare floor.

Larry eased the casters into the four clean squares in the carpet. They fit.

Nobody said anything. Grant had taken off his cap. Otis stood with his hand on the top of the upright, his head down, and I realized he was praying, very quietly, not for anything, just standing there.

I went over and lifted the fallboard. The keys were cool and slightly yellow. I wiped them with the sleeve of my sweater, from the low end to the high.

I pressed the middle C. It stuck, sluggish, halfway down, and then slowly came back up.

“Katie said to tell her it sticks,” I said.

Walt laughed, and then he wasn’t laughing.

“Well,” Gus said, finally. He put his cap back on. “That’s a good afternoon’s work.”