Orson Card - Maps in a Mirror - The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

Yet. Once Joe went to the piano and lifted the lid and played every key on the piano. And when he had done that he put his head down on the piano and cried, because he knew that when Chris lost that piano, lost even his fingers so he could never play again—it was like Joe losing his bar. And if Joe ever lost his bar, his life wouldn’t be worth living.

As for Chris, someone else began coming to the bar driving the same doughnut delivery van, and no one ever knew Chris again in that part of the world.

“Oh what a beautiful mornin’!” sang the road crew man who had seen Oklahoma! four times in his home town.

“Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham!” sang the road crew man who had learned to sing when his family got together with guitars.

“Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom!” sang the road crew man who believed.

But the road crew man without hands, who held the signs telling the traffic to Stop or go Slow, listened but never sang.

“Whyn’t you never sing?” asked the road crew man who liked Rodgers and Hammerstein; asked all of them, at one time or another.

And the man they called Sugar just shrugged. “Don’t feel like singin’,” he’d say, when he said anything at all.

“Why they call him Sugar?” a new guy once asked. “He don’t look sweet to me.”

And the man who believed said, “His initials are C H. Like the sugar. C&H, you know.” And the new guy laughed. A stupid joke, but the kind of gag that makes life easier on the road-building crew.

Not that life was that hard. For these men, too, had been tested, and they were in the job that made them happiest. They took pride in the pain of sunburn and pulled muscles, and the road growing long and thin behind them was the most beautiful thing in the world. And so they sang all day at their work, knowing that they could not possibly be happier than they were this day.

Except Sugar.

Then Guillermo came. A short Mexican who spoke with an accent, Guillermo told everyone who asked, “I may come from Sonora, but my heart belongs in Milano!” And when anyone asked why (and often when no one asked anything) he’d explain. “I’m an Italian tenor in a Mexican body,” and he proved it by singing every note that Puccini and Verdi ever wrote. “Caruso was nothing,” Guillermo boasted. “Listen to this!”

Guillermo had records, and sang along with them, and at work on the road crew he’d join in with any man’s song and harmonize with it, or sing an obligato high above the melody, a soaring tenor that took the roof off his head and filled the clouds. “I can sing,” Guillermo would say, and soon the other road crew men answered. “Damn right, Guillermo! Sing it again!”

But one night Guillermo was honest, and told the truth. “Ah, my friends, I’m no singer.”

“What do you mean? Of course you are!” came the unanimous answer.

“Nonsense!” Guillermo cried, his voice theatrical. “If I am this great singer, why do you never see me going off to record songs? Hey? This is a great singer? Nonsense! Great singers they raise to be great singers. I’m just a man who loves to sing, but has no talent! I’m a man who loves to work on the road crew with men like you, and sing his guts out, but in the opera I could never be! Never!”

He did not say it sadly. He said it fervently, confidently. “Here is where I belong! I can sing to you who like to hear me sing! I can harmonize with you when I feel a harmony in my heart. But don’t be thinking that Guillermo is a great singer, because he’s not!”

It was an evening of honesty, and every man there explained why it was he was happy on the road crew, and didn’t wish to be anywhere else. Everyone, that is, except Sugar.

“Come on, Sugar. Aren’t you happy here?”

Sugar smiled. “I’m happy. I like it here. This is good work for me. And I love to hear you sing.”

“Then why don’t you sing with us?”

Sugar shook his head. “I’m not a singer.”

But Guillermo looked at him knowingly. “Not a singer, ha! Not a singer. A man without hands who refuses to sing is not a man who is not a singer. Hey?”

“What the hell does that mean?” asked the man who sang folksongs.

“It means that this man you call Sugar, he’s a fraud. Not a singer! Look at his hands. All his fingers gone! Who is it who cuts off men’s fingers?”

The road crew didn’t try to guess. There were many ways a man could lose fingers, and none of them were anyone’s business.

“He loses his fingers because he breaks the law and the Watchers cut them off! That’s how a man loses fingers. What was he doing with his fingers that the Watchers wanted him to stop? He was breaking the law, wasn’t he?”

“Stop,” Sugar said.

“If you want,” Guillermo said, but for once the others would not respect Sugar’s privacy.

“Tell us,” they said.

Sugar left the room.

“Tell us,” and Guillermo told them. That Sugar must have been a Maker who broke the law and was forbidden to make music anymore. The very thought that a Maker was working on the road crew with them—even a lawbreaker—filled the men with awe. Makers were rare, and they were the most esteemed of men and women.

“But why his fingers?”

“Because,” Guillermo said, “he must have tried to make music again afterward. And when you break the law a second time, the power to break it a third time is taken away from you.” Guillermo spoke seriously, and so to the road crew men Sugar’s story sounded as majestic and terrible as an opera. They crowded into Sugar’s room, and found the man staring at the wall.

“Sugar, is it true?” asked the man who loved Rodgers and Hammerstein.

“Were you a Maker?” asked the man who believed.

“Yes,” Sugar said.

“But Sugar,” the man who believed said, “God can’t mean for a man to stop making music, even if he broke the law.”

Sugar smiled. “No one asked God.”

“Sugar,” Guillermo finally said, “There are nine of us on the crew, nine of us, and we’re miles from any human beings. You know us, Sugar. We swear on our mother’s graves, every one of us, that we’ll never tell a soul. Why should we? You’re one of us. But sing, dammit man, sing!”

“I can’t,” Sugar said. “You don’t understand.”

“It isn’t what God intended,” said the man who believed. “We’re all doing what we love best, and here you are, loving music and not able to sing a note. Sing for us! Sing with us! And only you and us and God will know!”

They all promised. They all pleaded.

And the next day as the man who loved Rodgers and Hammerstein sang “Love, Look Away,” Sugar began to hum. As the man who believed sang “God of Our Fathers” Sugar sang softly along. And as the man who loved folksongs sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” Sugar joined in with a strange, piping voice and all the men laughed and cheered and welcomed Sugar’s voice to the songs.

Inevitably Sugar began inventing. First harmonies, of course, strange harmonies that made Guillermo frown and then, after a while, grin as he joined in, sensing as best he could what Sugar was doing to the music.

And after harmonies, Sugar began singing his own melodies, with his own words. He made them repetitive, the word simple and the melodies simpler still. And yet he shaped them into odd shapes, and built them into songs that had never been heard of before, that sounded wrong and yet were absolutely right. It was not long before the man who loved Rodgers and Hammerstein and the man who sang folksongs and the man who believed were learning Sugar’s songs and singing them joyously or mournfully or angrily or gaily as they worked along the road.