Read Online The Blood Ballad by Rett MacPherson - Free Book Online Page B

thousand dollars on a horse named Gidget. She lost the money.”
    He waved his hands in protest. “I know,” he said. “I can barely have a normal conversation with her, but her research deserves some closer scrutiny. I’m aware of your credentials. My mother told me if there was anybody in the Keith family to go to with this, it was you. I’m trusting you that you’ll give this an unbiased, clinical study. I’ve got Phoebe’s research at home. After you hear the CD, we’ll talk more.”
    I blinked at him. “All right, Glen,” I said with a big sigh. “I’ll listen to it.”
    He exited the museum quickly, and I glanced down at the CD he’d given me. He knew exactly what buttons to push. I itched to hear this CD so badly that it actually felt heavy in my hands.

Seven
    Stephanie sat in the chair across from my desk with her chin resting in her hand. I put the CD in the player and waited for music. Nothing happened. I checked the cord and made sure it was plugged in. Still nothing. Then I banged on it. Finally, it spurted and kicked in and music began to play.
    â€œIs that him? Is that our grandpa?” I felt sorry for Stephanie. She was the product of an affair that my father had had, and he hadn’t known she’d existed until she was grown. As a result, Stephanie had missed out on weekends in the country at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. She had missed out on all the crazy sleepovers and strawberry-picking frenzies that all of us cousins had engaged in on a regular basis, as well as running through the orchard at night catching fireflies, nearly drowning in the pond, chasing the dogs down the road, pulling ticks off of the back of your legs at the same time you nursed the stings inflicted by nettles. But most of all, she had missed out on the music—the endless jam sessions of all of our uncles and our dad in Grandma’s living room or, in the summer, out in the front yard. The question of whether or not Grandpa was actually going to treat us with playing a song on his fiddle would hang in the air. Then inevitably, at some point, he’d pick up his instrument and scratch out a few old dance tunes.
    Stephanie had missed all of that, through no fault of her own. It was at times like this that I could have kicked my father a good one for the careless way he’d sauntered through life. But, at the same time, if it had been any other way, I wouldn’t have had one of my newest dear friends sitting across from me. I was beginning to believe that there was no healthy place for regret.
    I listened to the music carefully. It was definitely in the style of my grandpa, but I’d really only heard him as an old man. Sometime during the fifties, my father had taped my grandpa, but even then, he’d hardly been young. Besides, it wasn’t as if I was a musicologist. A fiddle is a fiddle, right? Probably the only time I could pick out a specific musician was because I could recognize certain guitar styles. My father and his brother had a definite style all their own that I could pick out in a crowd. I’d listened to my father play every single day growing up. It would be hard not to be able to pinpoint him, but—the fiddle? My ear just wasn’t that well trained.
    â€œI’m not sure,” I said. There were no liner notes that came with the homemade CD that Glen had given me, so I wasn’t even sure what I was listening to. The first song ended and then I heard a voice come on.
    â€œHey, Johnny, how many babies you got now?” I had no idea whose voice it was, but the man spoke in that clipped and fast way that people did during the Depression.
    â€œNext month’s gonna be my third,” he said. “I wrote this next song for Jed.”
    Jed would have been my grandpa’s eldest son. He couldn’t have been more than a few years old if the third baby was on its way. “That was Grandpa,” I