KEYBOARD
My formative years were during the early years of television in the Fifties, when the Western series — Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Wagon Train, Paladin, and my fav, Cheyenne — were at their peak, it’s not surprising that I ended up where I am east of the Rockies near the Canadian border. The archetype of the powerful but modest man who seeks righteousness is a strong one for me and sometimes led me astray. Not that the men let me down (some did, some didn’t) but that it kept me from my own development because I gave away my own strength. That’s a cliché now, a feminist frontier archetype.
But sometimes I think about Westerns. The best one I like right now is “Mystery Road,” an Australian version with a tough woman and an indigenous just-as-tough man. It’s modern and the resource development is about water aquifers. The numinous mystery between land and ancient peoples is just strange enough for Americans to add power. This is not “Quigley Down Under” with its cheerful co-opts of violence. Rather “Mystery Road” is a slow meditation of a vast land.
Land versus habitation come close to the philosophy and phenomenology that I read in nonfiction form. Most writers are urban or academic, though they think quite a bit about one culture overrunning and nearly destroying another. Could I use that in a story? Actually, I do all the time. In the Sixties living with Scriver meant daily creating sculpture of people and animals in a land with a horizon that endured no matter how much we tinkered with the watersheds and replaced bison with Herefords and Angus. Let’s play with this a bit.
Instead of a real village imitating modern suburbs except with century-old infrastructure or the remnant ghost towns that people explore at their own peril, let’s consider one of the little towns built to be movie sets for Westerns. Some buildings have rooms and roofs and others are just facades, but there is always a boardwalk to escape the mud and dust and always at the end of the street is a little white church with a steeple, a bit of New England stuck there to represent civilization. A saloon with swinging doors is across from the sheriff’s office.
So since this is already a reflexive situation, watching ourselves watch ourselves, let’s just start a story.
One day my husband came home and said, “Honey, I just bought us a town!” All I could say was “what?” It made more sense when he finally told me that he’d been diagnosed with cancer. He was trying to go back to the past and old Western movies in order to avoid looking at what might be a short and painful future, although cancer is not the death sentence it once was.
Building reproductions of the past is a popular way to dream about the mythic stories. Here are two links.
https://www.livingstonenterprise.com/content/movie-town
http://fortbentonmuseums.com/the-museums/starr-gallery-of-western-art/
With modern medicine my husband Bud was soon in a state of remission, well enough for us to go see this town he had bought with only photos for a guide. I understood him and supported his plan, though it was scary. To pay for it he had sold the house we were living in, but at least he didn’t sell my grand piano. I’m not good enough for concerts, but that piano is my soul. He knew it.
The building most complete and least damaged was the saloon, partly because the upstairs bedrooms had functioned as a real hotel for the actors and crew. We put my piano downstairs and carried the rest of the household up onto the balcony that functioned as a sort of hallway and into the bedroom that faced the east.
I insisted on a bedroom that faced east for morning sun. Most people like to read in bed before they sleep at night but I like to read when I wake up, or maybe write because my head is still full of stories like music. Bud never minded, even when I almost woke up so early that I’d traded night for day or thought I was in a different place on the planet where the dawn had not yet reached. In this place, I could actually watch the sun rise without getting up. I’d stretch out my hand to rest on Bud as he slept. He took so many pain-killers that he never woke up early. After in spite of everything he died, I’d still reach out for him while I read, forgetting that he was gone.
Then one morning when early sun was streaking the walls, I heard piano music. Someone was downstairs playing my grand piano. Playing it well. I pulled on my housecoat and crept out onto the balcony. An old woman was at the keyboard, crashing through a concerto I didn’t know, her hands flying from one side to the other, rocking the rhythm. She wasn’t dressed like an old woman but more like a cowboy with jeans and a pearl stud snapped shirt.
The balcony creaked. She turned around to see me and she grinned, completely confident that I would be pleased. “I thought I might wake you up!” she said.
Lots of starts here. I’m up to nearly nine hundred words. I shoot for a thousand. What should I make of this beginning? Is it about past versus future, beginning again? Should I have the saloon burn down and the piano with it, but the name of the saloon is “The Keyboard” (like a friend’s blog) so she re-settles in the little white church, makes the vestry into a bedroom, and is wakened by the thunder of a pipe organ!
This time there is no instrument, but a teenaged boy with long hair is sitting in one of the back pews and the music is coming from him. Not exactly him — his laptop computer. He grins at her and he says, “I wish I had better speakers.”
1017 words.
