Hard As Nails, Dummy

Mandolin Lessons


Now I know that clutter of stasis:
Papers and mail and unneeded gifts and junk
Piled like fecund undergrowth on tables and chairs and floor.
Movement and presence marked solely by the absence of dust.
The house nothing more than shelter
A mausoleum alive only with memory and loss.

Now I know the depressed machinations
Of that old man, Eck Cullen or some such name:
The fogged un-affect and monosyllabic labored replies.

But at the time, fall 1987, I was only twenty-four
With maybe just one heartbreak on my resume,
And overwhelmed by the utter sadness of person and place.
This was upper Appalachia
Thirty miles northeast of Clearfield, Pennsylvania.
Young People Who Care missions had sent me, Campus Minister,
And student Brad, sixteen and as plain and quiet
And enigmatic as his name, to Eck’s house
To do some cleaning for him.
I’m sure Eck hadn’t asked for the help
But was probably too polite or apathetic to refuse.
The only thing that looked possibly half-alive in the house
Was a mandolin hanging from a nail on a wall.
Eck couldn’t care less that we couldn’t move
A stubborn piece of furniture
To wash the wall behind it.
His wife had died two years before, we had been told,
And obviously not much had moved in that house since.

As Brad and I ate our peanut butter and jelly and water lunch
Eck just sat there, probably out of some ingrained notion
Of hospitality, but he didn’t say anything.
I can’t say he even endured our presence; he wasn’t that active.
I guess out of a feeling to model some vague idea
Of compassionate, ersatz Christ-like adulthood for Brad,
I finally asked Eck if he played that mandolin.
“Not for a long time,” he said, never looking at me.
“I love to hear a mandolin,” I said, which was true,
Having recently discovered the Byrds’
Sweetheart of the Rodeo album
And dipped my toes into some bluegrass.
“I’d love to hear you play.”

I’m sure there was a shrug of some sort I missed
And then Eck got up and took the mandolin off the wall.
He blew some dust off, plucked a couple strings,
Turned a knob or two
And then started to play.
Clunky at first, somewhat sour and hesitant,
Then a tune emerged. Rudimentary.

Twenty years later I might be able to name the tune,
But at the time I was too mesmerized to think.
Mesmerized not by any artistry
Or by witnessing any kind of momentary resurrection
In the old man’s demeanor, life.
Mesmerized instead, I now believe,
By what I thought was my power to infuse life.

For weeks after, I pictured the old man
More and more often pulling the mandolin down off the wall
And gradually reclaiming whatever mastery of the instrument
He’d once possessed,
Gradually coming out of the fog for a few minutes at a time.

Now, I doubt all that.
He barely acknowledged whatever praise or applause
I and maybe even Brad paid him.
He never smiled the hint of a smile
I thought I had earned.
He just put the mandolin back on the nail on the wall
And I think I know now he never touched it again.

Compassion, doing the Lord’s work, if you will,
Is not a voyeur’s pleasure.
It’s hard, unrewarding labor
Like life is too often hard and unrewarding.

Hard as nails, dummy, I say to myself now.

Joe Maphis-Fire On The Strings