36. Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Six
BEN
Ella’s up to something.
I know it by supper. She’s got the same tell as her daddy, which is being extremely casual about a thing nobody asked her to be casual about.
Twice she checks her phone and puts it away, smiling.
Once she asks, offhand, whether I own a shirt with snaps, which is a strange question to ask a man in Tennessee, where the answer is legally required to be yes.
“We’re going out,” she announces at seven. “Bootleggers. Go put on the snaps.”
“It’s a Thursday.”
“It’s a special Thursday.” She’s already herding me toward the cabin like Dolly moving a straggler. “Nate’s got something on.”
“Who’s Nate?”
“You’ll see.”
Bootleggers on a Thursday should be a quiet room and a jukebox.
Instead, the gravel lot’s full to the fence, there’s a hand-lettered board by the door reading TONIGHT: LIVE MUSIC, and inside the place is packed shoulder to shoulder.
The pool table’s been pushed to the wall, and somebody’s rigged a plywood stage in the corner where the dartboard usually hangs.
Rose is behind the taps with two extra hands on, moving like a woman conducting an orchestra. And leaning at the end of the bar, watching the room the way I’d watch a herd, is a man I haven’t met.
Big fella. My age, maybe a shade older. Forearms inked to the elbow, gray threading in early at the temples, with a look on his face that tells me he’s thrown people out of places professionally. He clocks us the second we’re through the door and comes off the bar with his hand out.
“You’re Callahan.” His grip’s a fair fight. “Nate Sullivan. This is my place.”
“Good place.”
“It’s a dive,” he says, comfortable. “I bought it as a dive. I maintain it as a dive. Your girl here tried to get me to put candles on the tables tonight, and I told her there’s a fire code and also a dignity code.
” He nods at Ella, who is failing to look innocent.
“She’s been planning this for two weeks.
I want that on the record before whatever happens to your face happens to it. ”
“Before what happens to my face?”
That’s when the corner stage lights come on, and people start coming up onto the plywood carrying instrument cases I know.
I know the cases before I know the people.
The tweed hardshell with the Wild Briar Feed sticker peeling off the hip.
The drum cases stenciled WBB in Maeve’s paint pen.
Then the barlight sorts them out, and it’s my cousin Ethan, setting his old acoustic on its stand like he does it here every week.
Luke behind him with the Telecaster. Noah with the fiddle and the mandolin.
Maeve plugging in her own mic because she says public ones have too many germs. And swinging up behind the kit, twirling a stick, grinning at me across two hundred heads like this is the best crime he’s ever pulled, my brother.
The Wild Briar Boys.
My family. The band’s played every dance hall, grange, and wedding within fifty miles of home since Caleb and I returned to the Creek.
Ethan fronting, Luke burning, Noah sawing, Maeve stacking the harmonies, Caleb keeping time.
And me. Bass since I was twenty, every Saturday of my grown life, right up until June, when I drove south for a wedding and never came back for my spot.
Twelve weeks. Longest I’ve gone without playing with these people since I became a man, and Ella Lockhart is standing beside me, vibrating like a struck wire, watching my face like it’s Christmas morning.
“Ella.”
“Caleb sold you out,” she says, all in a rush, the casual act collapsing entirely.
“He said the band’s had a Ben-shaped hole in it all summer.
That you’ve held down the bottom end since you were twenty, that you haven’t touched a bass since June, and that you’d never once ask them to make the drive, because you never ask anybody for anything.
So I asked. I called Maeve. Maeve had the whole thing organized inside a day, and Nate gave them the room.
” She runs out of speed. Her hand finds my arm.
“You gave everyone else a taste of home. Somebody ought to return it.”
I look at the stage. Ethan’s looking back at me, tuning by ear, entirely unsurprised.
“There he is,” he says into the mic. “Evening, Cedar Ridge. We’re the Wild Briar Boys.
We drove south for two reasons, and the brisket was only one of them.
” He tips his head at the empty stand at stage left.
“Ben Callahan. Your bass is up here. Caleb went in your old room and got it, so if anything’s missing, that’s between you brothers.
Get on up, bud. Twelve weeks is long enough. ”
The room turns. All of it. Deke, Maggie, Earl Fisk with his notepad already out.
Miss Ida’s crowd at the long table. Naomi and Dinah in the corner booth.
Silas and May by the pool table looking zero percent surprised, which tells me how deep this conspiracy runs.
Beth’s on a stool with a man beside her wearing a canvas jacket that I recognize even if nobody’s saying so.
The whole town, waiting, warm, like a held chord.
My family drove two hours on a Thursday. For this. For me.
“You don’t have to,” Ella says, reading my face the way she does.
“Say the word and we drink beer and watch your cousins show off. But Ben. Nobody up there’s going to watch you.
That’s the whole point of the instrument, Caleb says you told him that once.
You get to be part of it without being looked at.
” She squeezes my arm. “Go be part of it.”
Rose slides a beer down the bar to me, on the house, and says, “If you embarrass my sister, I’ll tell the room about the hot chocolate.”
I go up.
The bass on the stand is mine. My own P-bass, the one that’s hung on the wall of my old room since June, strung heavy, action low, smelling of home.
Caleb passes me the strap over his kit without a word, but the grin says plenty.
Maeve leans off her mic long enough to fix my collar like I’m nine.
Luke says, “Try to keep up,” which is what he’s said before every show since their sibling four-piece admitted their cousins and became six.
Ethan counts it off without asking if I’m ready, four clicks of Caleb’s sticks, because in this family readiness is a thing you find on the one.
And there it is.
That’s the miracle of the night, and I get to have it in front of two hundred people.
Root, fifth, walk-up, twelve weeks of silence and it’s sitting right there in my fingers.
Caleb’s kick drum locks to my right hand the way it has since we were teenagers in a shed, one pulse split between two people.
We open with the Haggard number Ethan’s opened with since before any of us could vote.
The floor fills in eight bars. Boots, a shuffle, Miss Ida’s crowd two-stepping like a drill team.
Dust off the boards. Rose’s taps flying.
I stand in the corner of the stage, in the shadow past the light, holding the whole dancing room up from underneath.
Nobody watches me. Everybody moves to me. It’s the best job in the world, and I’d forgotten it existed.
Somewhere in the third song, I find Ella in the crowd. She’s not dancing. She’s standing at the bar with her drink forgotten, watching me with her hand at the chain on her throat and her heart out on her face.
I hold her eye across the room and thump the root a little harder, just for her. She laughs and I can’t hear it, but I feel it anyway.
We play two hours. Waltzes for the old couples, Noah swapping fiddle for mandolin and back, Maeve’s harmonies riding Ethan’s lead so close they share one throat, the fast ones for Beth’s crowd.
And late, when the floor’s gone slow and swaying, Ethan calls the closer.
The old Wild Briar tune that isn’t written down anywhere, handed along like the fiddle tunes.
The one Luke picked out badly on a porch when we were boys, before he could play it.
He can play it now. I lay the long notes under it and look out at Cedar Ridge holding each other in the bar light.
Silas has May out there turning slow. Naomi’s got Dinah.
The room I walked into as a headline twelve weeks ago is dancing on my command.
Both my homes in one song. That’s what she built me tonight. A bridge with a backbeat.
After, once the gear’s cased, there’s a pile of Callahan hugs that moves ribs.
Maeve makes me promise October still stands.
Ethan tells Silas, over the good bourbon Nate produces from under the register, that the barn photos didn’t do it justice.
Then Nate finds me at the bar with two beers and a look on his face I can’t place.
“So here’s my thing,” he says. “Your family tells me they’ll drive down and play this room every season.
Best booking this dive has ever landed, and I got it for brisket and gas money.
But between times, first Thursday of the month, there’s pickers in this town with nobody to hold them together.
Slot’s yours if you want it. The town likes you, which around here is the whole licensing process.
” He holds out the beer. “First Thursdays, Callahan. You in?”
A standing gig. Family shows every season. A future penciled in public, four seasons deep into next year.
I look down the bar at Ella, who has absolutely heard every word and is studying the ceiling pretending she hasn’t.
“I’m in.”
We walk out into the gravel lot, ears ringing, my forearm aching in the old way I’d forgotten, her hand in mine. The mountains are black cutouts against a sky full of stars, and the lot’s emptying around us in slow taillights and called goodnights.
“Ella.” I stop her at the truck. “Tonight. What you did.” My voice needs a second.
“Twenty years I’ve been the one who builds it.
The lunches, the gates, the lists, the wedding that…
All of it. I build, other people stand in it.
That’s the trade, that’s been the trade my entire life.
” The stars wheel on. Her face is turned up to mine, quiet, listening the way she listens. “Nobody ever built me anything before.”
She reaches up and lays her hand flat on my chest, over the noise my heart’s making.
“Get used to it,” she says.