Read Online Grand Change by William Andrews - Free Book Online

with that reverence shining in his eyes.
    â€œThink you’ll make ’er, do you?” Jim Mackie said, his eyes in a thoughtful peer. “Well, you never know.” He went back to working the tune.
    â€œAnd you don’t know the chords,” Alban Gallant said, looking at me. I nodded. Alban took the guitar, his left hand taking position. “You use bar chords,” he said. He ran his left hand up the neck of the guitar, shifting his fingers and barring chords. He paused now and then, watching Jim, waiting for a chord turn in his fiddling. “A sharp,” Alban Gallant finally said, holding up his left index finger. “You use this finger instead of the nut—that’s this white thing here at the end of the fingerboard. You use the other fingers to get the chord, like this…” He paused for a minute with his fingers on the strings, thinking. “Wait a minute; got any elastic?” he said to no one in particular.
    â€œTake one of the wife’s garters,” Jim Mackie said, without a pause.
    â€œI use binder twine—all I can afford,” Alice said, slapping down the pack of cards. “Hearts are trump.”
    â€œEnough to tie up a good-sized sheaf, too,” Jim said.
    â€œAnd enough to hang you with,” Alice said. She lurched out of her chair then, slapping down her cards, and got a piece of white elastic from the radio shelf. She dropped it on Alban on her way back to sit down.
    â€œWhere did you get that?” Jim Mackie said.
    â€œNever you mind.”
    Alban Gallant took half a pencil from his pocket and constructed a crude capo by choking the guitar neck with the elastic and binding the tips of the pencil with it laying across the strings. “You make up one of these and put it where you get the right sound with the chords, you know, see?”
    â€œYeah, I do,” I said. I took the guitar and moved the capo up and down the strings, working my three chords, marvelling at how such a complicated thing could be made so simple.
    â€œTime you learned a few more,” Alban said after watching me awhile. “Here.” He began placing my fingers on the strings. “This is C… This is F… You use them with G… Yeah, good. You learn quick.”
    Jim Mackie had not paused in his pondering saw.
    â€œHe’s into it,” Alice said, eyeing Jim and slapping down a card. “There’ll be nothing but squeaks and squawks tonight. Once he starts a tune, he’s gone.”
    Jim paid Alice no heed.
    Alban Gallant paused, watching Jim with a smirk on his face. “Well I guess I’ll head home,” he said. He paused again, still looking at Jim. Finally, he took the guitar, deconstructed the capo, and put the guitar in a homemade canvas bag.
    â€œDon’t forget to give the elastic back to the wife,” Jim Mackie said, deadpan. “It might belong to her ‘unmentionables.’” He did not pause in his fiddling.
    â€œI use binder twine for them, too,” Alice said.
    â€œWe’ll be seeing youse,” Alban said, heading for the door.
    Everybody responded but Jim.
    â€œYou boys may as well join us in a four-hander of Auction,” Alice said.
    We sat in and played three games and Jim never let up. We had lunch and Jim didn’t even let up to eat; his tea went cold beside the sandwiches and cake in a saucer on the stove’s oven door.
    â€œIf I was a squeeze box, he would have traded me in for a fiddle by now,” Alice said when we left.
    Jim managed a “keep at her” without breaking stride.
    Outside, the night had grown gloomier, speaking of more snow. There was still no wind. We walked in silence down past Dan Coulter’s house, which was situated just below the crown of the hollow. The shallow lamp glow from Dan’s window stretched our shadows angle-wise and cast a faint glow at the block of woods by the brook as we made our way along.
    â€œIf I get