Bound to Ramble, part one

Harold had the bushiest eyebrows in all of Polk county. Folks when they would meet him would always remark about his eyebrows, no matter what else Harlod did. And that was indeed an impressive feat for Harold also played a mean banjo. Harold had been playing since he was just a boy, traveling with his family to the flatlands in the summers to pick cotton. Those kids swore that those summer evenings in the Arkansas delta were as close to hell as any place on this here earth. The humidity was so thick you could slather it on a piece a bread with a spoon. And so Harold began to pick a homemade cigar-box banjo he had made to keep their minds off the heat. At first, The kids couldn't decide which was worse: the pickin or the climate. But Harold, like his daddy, was as stubborn as an old dog and he picked that poor banjo every night after pickin that poor cotton. With callosed and even bloody hands, Harold would struggle to figure out how to roll his fingers in time to make that banjo sing like all the greats. When they were in the hills in the off-season, they could sometimes pick up the Opry on the AM radio if it were clear enough. They had heard Earl Scruggs and Ralph Stanley and in that hearing they were transported, not to Nashville, but to somewhere even better, somewhere like heaven were their troubles weren't gone but understood. When Stanley would moan Man of Constant Sorrow, they knew that pain instinctively. And it was only in that place, somewhere like heaven, that Harold truley felt home, felt alive. He knew he was destined to pick.

And so he picked and by the end of that first summer, he not only had the finger-roll down but he could play a recognizable Orange Blossom Special and for a moment the family forgot all about the Opry and found that place of understanding had found them there in that ghost of a house they filled. Each of the kids got to spend some of the cotton money on themselves, usually they would buy some prize like a coca-cola or if they had had a real good harvest a new pair of shoes. But this summer, they left the coke in the icebox and threw in to get Harold a real banjo, a used one that a friend at the gin got in Memphis, but a real one nonetheless. Years later, Harold would think back on that day, on that banjo and he would still cry. Never had he been so surprised, so happy, so whole. Harold took that hollow-back banjo in his hands and he smelled the wood, cedar. As he inhaled the distinct smell, he knew it was a good gift, the best even. And as he sat down to pick it, the Orange Blossom Special never sounded so good and perhaps never again. When we was done, he laid it down on the bed beside him and nearly prayed over that instrument, "Its so good, so very good." And so it was, for a time.



This is part one of a five part short-story I will be publishing the next five Thursday nights.