Music of the Inner Lakes

MUSIC OF THE INNER LAKES/Roger Shejfer FORALONG TIME I held my left hand in a fist. I held my right hand in a fist, too, as if to protect it from what had happened to the left that day in the Silver Lake store, when my cousin asked, "How thin do you want your turkey?." and I said, "I don't know." A careless gesture, bright blade spinning, the upper joints of my ring and pinkie fingers suddenly disconnected, suspended in air above the slicer, then dropping into a pool of blood. After five years of self-pity, I opened both fists and gave serious thought to playing guitar again. I reversed the strings and began to retrain my left hand as the picking hand, stood in front of the mirror, made myself dizzy, then tried it with my eyes closed. No music. That was in July. After that, the guitar sat in its case, a shadowy object propped against the wall, pinheaded, bottom-heavy. Eventually I reversed the strings back to their normal sequence and made do with the chords that could be held down with two fingers, getting the thumb involved by reaching around to the sixth string. "Such a coward," my cousin said as she bagged my groceries: packaged lunch meat, rye bread, beer, pretzels, mayonnaise, canned goods. Lastnight, scared ofrowing across the lake in the rain, I had missed the weekly folk concert at the town museum. "How were the fiddlers?" I asked. "Absent. Sick. Food poisoning." Janine frowned at a can of chicken soup, obviously unsure of the price, dropped it into my pack without ringing it up, and waved her hand over the keys of the cash register as if to appease the god of commerce. "I wish you'd stop being a hermit and hook up your damn phone. When you don't show up on time for something, the first thing I assume is that your boat sank." "It was supposed to rain." "So? I went anyway. Your hair gets wet, no big deal. I'm about ready to shave mine all off, you know." She pulled the concert flyer from the side of the register, balled it up and tossed it into the trash, then clapped her hands, applauding either her good aim or the fact that the concert was over. "Other musicians came up and played, some bad, some good, if you trust my opinion. I took a blanket and sat on the lawn. No mosquitoes, and it didn't rain! At least not on our end of The Missouri Review · 25 the lake. You would have loved it!" she raved. She slapped her left hand on the counter, kept a steady beat as she described the quartet who had come up on stage as the final act. "Youjust would have loved them." She was talking about the Meekers, very backwoods locals, occasional store customers who bought gas and cigarettes, kerosene in winter . They paid cash only, no credit—and no food stamps, though they were surely eUgible. They had a place twenty miles north of SUver Lake on a desolate road named for the family. Father, mother, brother, sister, they were folk performers of the most primitive kind. No instruments. Their purely vocal music was original, sorrowful, repetitive, shocking. They sang everything in octaves and fourths and fifths. "To this beat," Janine said, slapping the counter again with a forceful stare. Half the show was how the family looked, she said, their heads stiff and eyes wide open, scared either by their own music or by the horrors the music described. "Look how mad you are. Ha! You really missed something!" I was mad, but I was also disgusted with myself, with my faUure to write any music for the past several years. I left the store still feeling mad at myself. When I got to my boat, there was an inch of water in it, a soggy towel, a popsicle wrapper. I set the backpack on the rear seat and grabbed the oars. I looked at my fingers. There might be a song in the horrors of slicing off fingertips, but I would change the story and...