3. The Right Way to Hold the Hay #2
"She will." He drives the post home. "He did it with me the first time I came here. Ivy said it happens maybe twice a year."
"What does it mean?"
Cash shrugs. "Something."
Lila's truck backs out of the First Note Farm drive at five past one. I don't watch it go. I note the sound of it on the county road, Nashville direction, and then it's gone, and there is just the fence line and Cash and the green hills going on in every direction.
"Don't mess it up," Cash says.
"Nothing to mess up. She doesn't even like me."
"Sure." He picks up the wire. "That's exactly what I said about Angel."
I get back to the fence.
LILA
Nashville / Studio District — Tuesday Afternoon
Bay 4 smells like every studio I have ever worked in: coffee, electrical current, and the quiet that costs money by the hour.
Nathan at the front desk waves me through. My kit is set up the way I texted ahead: throne height, snare adjusted, hi-hat where my left foot has always wanted it.
I check the throne. Check the snare. Tap through the hi-hats for feel.
This is the part that belongs to me. Before the producer comes in, the conversation starts, and I become whatever useful thing the session needs.
Right now, it is just the kit, the room, and the cost-per-hour quiet.
I took this session because the engineer is good and the drummer's chart is interesting. Not because I needed the work that badly.
The First Note Farm residency has covered the cost of the Nashville apartment for a year.
But extra money is always welcome. The drums are how I make my living.
The drums are how I make my living.
Piano is something else.
Piano was my father leaning in the doorway after chores were done.
Piano was the old upright before I ever knew Nashville existed.
Drums built the career.
Piano built me.
The songs I write are mine. I intend to keep them that way.
Dale comes in at twelve-fifteen with the two leads. A man and a woman with the look of people who have been the public version of themselves long enough that it has become the private version, too.
This is not a judgment. It is what the industry does over time, if you let it.
"Cash Wilder played a private show last month," the male lead says, making conversation. "You know him?"
"He's staying next door to where I work," I say.
"No kidding." He looks interested. I don't encourage it. "What's he like?"
"Tall," I say.
Dale moves us into the track.
* * *
The first track is standard architecture. Driving verses, opened-up chorus, pulled back on the bridge. I built it in the first run-through, and Dale calls it good.
This is what I am, here. Useful. Precise. The thing the music needs and nothing it doesn't. I have been doing this in sessions since I was twenty-two, and I am still good at it, and it fits well.
The second track has an unusual change in signature in the third verse. Half-time, which the previous drummer had treated like a full stop. I give it the space it is asking for instead.
Dale looks up from the board. "Do that again."
I do it again.
"Where did that come from?"
"The song," I say.
He laughs. The leads look relieved.
We run the third track, and I land the feel on the second pass. Dale calls it. He is right.
There is a special quality to the moment when you give the music what it was asking for. It doesn't announce itself. It settles.
I load out at three-forty and sit in my truck in the studio parking lot before I start it.
Somewhere in the second track, I kept thinking about land.
This is what happens when you spend a morning watching someone who knows cattle and then spend an afternoon trying not to think about it. Your hands do the right thing, and your mind goes somewhere flat and open.
I start the truck.
* * *
The highway is clear. Twenty-two minutes.
Window cracked. Radio on a station I've had since I was seventeen, back when seventeen still felt like almost-free.
I run the session back the way I always do on the drive home, looking for where I could have been cleaner, where I could have taken a different line. There isn't much. I was good today.
The Nashville skyline drops away behind me.
Tennessee hills roll in from both sides; they are fine hills, and they have been home for years, and I have liked them well enough, and there is still a part of my mind that is always measuring distance to the horizon and finding more in the way than it wants.
The Panhandle doesn't have hills. The Panhandle has the sky in every direction, unbroken, horizon going all the way around with nothing between you and the distance. My father said the sky out there was honest. He said it because he believed it.
He believed many things that turned out to be true.
And some things he kept to himself until it was too late.
My phone buzzes in the cupholder.
Tommy: Call me tonight. The deadline has moved.
I read it at the red light on the county road.
Put it down.
Sixty-eight days. Or what was 0sixty-eight days, and is now something fewer, and Promised Land Ranch is on the other end of a bank notice my father kept quietly to himself for two years, rather than call me and say, “There is a problem, and I need help.”
He would not have wanted to need help.
I know exactly where I got that.
And Tommy never said I should come home.
That somehow made it worse.
The light turns.
* * *
The First Note Farm fence line comes up on the left.
I slow for the turn and through the rails I see the east paddock, Shadow at his fence, even from the road, the barn, the covered structure where the piano is. Everything the way I left it.
On the Porch Light Farm side of the property line, in the long late light, there is a figure splitting wood.
Not the way you do it when someone assigns you the task. The way you do it when you have done it since you were tall enough to lift a maul. Even rhythm, no wasted motion, the ease of a body that knows this work the way it knows walking.
I pull into the drive and sit in the truck.
Jake Wilder is splitting wood in the back field, and he doesn't look up. He is the same here as he was at the fence this morning and at Cash's kitchen table last night.
The same.
Most people have a gap. A version they use at work, a version they use with family, and a version for strangers, and the gap between them is where you learn the most. I have spent two years in Ivy's program reading people through that gap.
I have not found it yet.
My father could look at a piece of land and tell you what it needed. What it could carry and what it couldn't, where the water held in a dry year and where it gave out. He said it wasn't a skill. He said it was listening.
I sit in my truck and watch Jake Wilder work, and the thing forming in the back of my mind is not about what I feel. It is practical. It is the kind of thought that arrives plainly and precisely, and waits at the edge of awareness until you are ready for it.
I am not ready yet.
I pick up my phone. Text Tommy: Tonight at eight.
I put it in my pocket and get out of the truck.
Shadow is at his fence rail, waiting the way he always does.
"Yeah," I tell him. "Long day."
He turns back to his hay.
Across the property line, the sound of wood splitting continues, unhurried, even, into the evening.
The thought doesn't finish.
Not yet.