David Gates: A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

I looked at Janna. She pointed back at him. You could see it: there was nobody in there anymore.

I let go of the hand. “I better call them.”

“Can’t you take a minute ?” she said. “This is what he came to give you.”

—

After Heather left, and the guy from the funeral home took the body away in the back of his black Escalade, I drove Janna into town for breakfast. It was still only ten in the morning. There was a family in the next booth, so it must have been Saturday. Or Sunday. One of the kids was playing games on his phone or whatever; I could hear the little beeps and the snatches of metallic music. How could this not be driving the parents crazy? Janna ordered a grapefruit that she didn’t eat; I had pancakes and no coffee. They were supposed to pick up the bed around noon, and I planned to sleep away the rest of the day.

“How are you holding up?” I said.

“He was absolutely on the money,” she said. “I am a stupid twat. At least you kept your mouth shut. We love you we love you we love you it’s all right to go . I’m going to be hearing that the rest of my life.”

“He didn’t know what he was saying. We did right by him.”

“So that’s what you’d want? Somebody doing right by you?”

“You’re beating yourself up,” I said. “We’re both exhausted.”

“This has to change.” She pushed the grapefruit away and waved to get the waitress. “Can you take me back to the house so I can get my car? Shit’s been piling up at the office.”

“They can spare you for one more day.”

“You don’t get what I’m telling you,” she said. “I’m not spending another night there. You can do what you want. Wear her fucking aprons, feed her fucking chickens. Sing your dead-people songs, whatever. Read your dead-people books. You’re going to kill yourself one of these days, making that drive in the winter. Look, this is my fault—I should’ve helped you. But you don’t even know who I am.”

—

These days the summer parties happen in other people’s fields, behind other people’s farmhouses. So far this year I’ve been to one near Ludlow, Vermont, and another one an hour south of Albany. It’s always the same people, give or take, and the same songs, said to be timeless. Our crowd isn’t old enough yet to be dying off; they don’t even seem to age that much year by year. But their kids, whose names I never remember, keep getting older, until you don’t see them anymore.

When I go, I go alone: Janna says if she has to hear a banjo one more time she’ll shoot herself, and I’m grateful to her for saying so. I’ve given Paul’s mandolin to the son of that banjo player who was in my band all those years ago. He’s nineteen or twenty, the son, loves the music and has the gift; he’d been playing some hopeless Gibson knockoff. You still see one or two like him. He makes it to some of the parties and we’ll do a song or two, I hope not just because he feels obliged. I suppose I’m getting too old to be standing out in a field on a summer night as the dew makes the strings slick, but I can still sing; having some age on me, maybe I sound more like the real thing.

It only took Janna two months to sell the old house on the dirt road. She got us our asking price, enough to buy a three-bedroom Craftsman-style bungalow—an office for her, a study for me—ten blocks from campus, four blocks from the health-food store. I walk to class, except on the coldest days, and Janna rides her bicycle to work. I play squash once a week with my department chair. We’ve bought a flat-screen television, forty-six inches, high definition, for my ball games and her shows. I’m making notes toward a second book. If I can ever finish, it could get me invited to a conference or two; despite that trip to the Brontë country, Janna says she wants to travel with me. You see all this as a defeat, I know. I would have. But I can’t begin to tell you.

My thanks to those who have published and edited these stories over the years: Amy Bloom, Michael Hainey, Yuka Igarashi, Field Maloney, Sigrid Rausing, Rob Spillman, Lorin Stein and Deborah Treisman.

To Molly Atlas for her diligence in placing them.

To Ruthie Reisner, for her patience in guiding me through the process of publication.

To Amy Ryan, for her vigilant copyediting.

To Alethea Black, Kevin Canty, Amy Hempel, Lee Johnson, Tom Piazza, Amanda Robb and Alison Weaver, for their advice, encouragement, support and friendship.

And to Gary Fisketjon and Amanda Urban, once again, for everything.

David Gates lives in Missoula, Montana, and Granville, New York. He teaches at the University of Montana and in the Bennington Writing Seminars, and was a writer and editor at Newsweek , where he specialized in music and books.