by Cary Fagan
One shoe tapped lightly as he played on the instrument that rested on his right knee, the narrow neck stretched up into his left hand.
Jeremiah knew it was a banjo, even though he had only seen one in a movie or maybe in a cartoon. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. It had an elegant neck with a design of vines and leaves on the fingerboard that shone as if it were made of pearls. It had a round body made of some dark, highly polished wood. Stretched over the round body was a kind of drumhead that was held tight with silver-colored clamps.
Jeremiah watched the man play. The swift fingers of his left hand pressed the strings. His right did the complicated picking or strumming or whatever it was, using his fingers and his thumb.
Jeremiah felt something stronger than he’d ever felt in his life. He felt a desire — no, more than a desire, a need — to be able to make music like that.
The man looked up and half nodded at them. He sang another verse, his voice a little raspy. He played the melody one more time and finished with a final strum.
He looked at them again and smiled.
“Good day,” he said.
“Hi. That was cool,” Luella said.
“Well, thank you.”
“We’d better get back to school. Come on, Jeremiah.”
She yanked his hand, but Jeremiah didn’t budge. He just stood there as if he was frozen, or paralyzed, or had been turned into a zombie.
“Do you live here?” he said at last.
“No, nobody does anymore. But I grew up here. We moved away when I was small. Haven’t been around for years. But I had a business appointment in town and thought I’d pass by.”
“I know that’s a banjo,” said Jeremiah, “but what kind of music were you playing?”
“I don’t know if there’s exactly a name for it. These days most people just call it ‘old time.’ It used to be played on the farms and in the countryside eighty years ago or more.”
“Is it black people’s music?”
“Jeremiah, you can’t ask that!” Luella said.
“No, it’s a good question,” the man said. “In fact, the banjo is based on instruments played in Africa. The slaves first played them in America. Later the white people took them up, too. The music got all mixed together. By now I’d call it everybody’s music.”
The man stood up. He put the banjo into a case that Jeremiah hadn’t noticed before. He was sorry to see it disappear.
“We’re supposed to be running,” Luella said. “We’d better get going.”
“Nice to have met you,” the man said. He picked up the banjo case and came down the porch stairs and went round the side of the house. Jeremiah heard a car start up. A few moments later he saw it moving along the dirt road. He watched as it got smaller.
“We’re going to be last!” Luella said, starting to run.
Jeremiah reluctantly looked away from the car, and turned to follow her.
3
Not a Joke
“WHAT DID YOU SAY?” Jeremiah’s mother’s voice screeched as it rose.
They were sitting in the formal dining room. His father sat at one end of the long table and his mother sat at the other, with Jeremiah in the middle. He had trouble seeing either of his parents because of the two candelabras on the table blocking his view. Two servants dressed in medieval tunics and leggings stood with silver platters, ready to offer second helpings of the evening meal. There was duck à l’orange, potato croquettes and asparagus in cream sauce.
“I think,” said Jeremiah’s father, winking at his son, “that our Jeremiah is making a joke. The banjo! That’s very good. Ha-ha! The next thing we know you’ll be walking around in overalls and bare feet with straw stuck between your teeth. You’ll be saying ‘Howdy’ and eating flapjacks.”
Jeremiah looked down at the untouched food on his plate. This wasn’t going to be easy.
“You always go on about how music is important, don’t you? Well, I looked it up and you’re absolutely right. It helps develop the brain. Music uses the left frontal cortex and the right cerebellum. And you know what? Musicians even have a more developed corpus callosum. Pretty impressive, huh?”
“Now, Jeremiah, there is music and there is music. Classical music is sophisticated. It’s subtle and intellectual and challenging. You’re already studying the piano. You’ve got a Hoosendorfer Deluxe Concert Grand to play on, the most expensive piano in the world. And even then we have to beg you to practice.”
“Exactly!” cried Jeremiah. “Because I’m not interested in the piano. And I’m not interested in Beethoven or Mozart or Scarlatti, either. There’s nothing wrong with classical music except that it’s not for me. The music I heard...it was like…whirling in a field or jumping into a pond or…oh, I don’t know. Please let me get a banjo. I’ve got more than enough money in my own bank account. In fact, I’ve got enough to buy a hundred banjos.”
“Do you hear this, Albert?” said Jeremiah’s mother. “Everything we’ve worked for. All those years of striving to make a better life. And our only son wants to throw it all away and…and play the banjo! It’s just too much.”
Jeremiah watched as his mother put her hand to her forehead and leaned back in her chair.
“Do you see how you’ve upset your mother?” said his father. “Jeremiah, I’m sorry. But we have to do what we think is best for you. We forbid you to buy a banjo. Now let that be the end of the discussion. And have some of this delicious duckling. It was imported from France and cost a small fortune.”
•••
BUT JEREMIAH didn’t forget about the man playing the banjo. He couldn’t forget. He heard the rhythm of the music in the click of his bicycle wheels as he rode around the grounds. He caught the melody in the raindrops tapping the window of his room.
One night he dreamed that he was walking in a giant field of wheat. In the distance he could see a single tree with great overhanging branches. He began to walk toward it. As he got closer he saw banjos hanging from the tree like ripe fruit. But when he reached up, the tree’s branches pulled away just as his fingers brushed them.
Not being allowed to buy a banjo didn’t mean that Jeremiah couldn’t learn about banjo music. He had his own internet music account, and his parents allowed him to buy and download whatever he wanted. He loaded his player with recordings by musicians with names like Clarence Ashley and Dink Roberts and Roscoe Holcomb, who were long dead. And with new musicians, too.
Each had his or her own peculiar style. Sometimes the banjo rang out like bells and sometimes it slurred like a blues guitar and sometimes it rattled like a drum full of gravel.
Jeremiah couldn’t get enough of it. In the back of the limousine, lounging in the living room while his parents talked about how to reach the Asian dental-floss market, lying on his king-sized bed, his ears would be filled with the sound of banjo.
All this listening made Jeremiah happy, for he had found a sound that matched his own inner music. But it also filled him with a painful yearning. Listening wasn’t enough. He would feel his own fingers moving in time, his left hand pretending to fret the fingerboard, his right plucking invisible strings.
“Enough with the air banjo,” Luella said to him one day. “You are becoming a total bore.” Jeremiah was lying on his back on the gravel of the tennis court, his hands moving while Luella sat beside him. “You don’t want to watch a movie. You don’t want to raft-surf in the pool or sneak up on the flamingos or do somersaults down the bowling alley. You don’t want to play killer tennis.”
“The last time we played killer tennis,” said Jeremiah, “I threw the racket into my mother’s eighteenth-century Italian birdbath.”
Luella picked up a handful of gravel and slowly poured it onto Jeremiah’s shirt.
“Hey!” He sat up.
“Oh, look. He’s alive.”
Jeremiah sighed. �
��I’m sorry. I know. But I can’t help it.”
“Well, we’re just going to have to do something about this, aren’t we?” said Luella. “It’s going to be impossible to hang around with you until you learn to play the banjo. And you can’t learn unless you have one.”
“I already told you. My parents won’t let me buy one.”
“Then there’s got to be some other solution. You know a lot about banjos already, right?”
“I guess.”
“Didn’t you tell me that in the old days a lot of poor people living in the country used to play them?”
“Sure.”
“Well, if they were poor, how did they get banjos?”
“I don’t know. They made them, I think.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. Your parents didn’t forbid you to make one, did they?”
“Well, no.” Jeremiah frowned. “But how can I make one? I’ve never made anything in my life except that key rack in shop class last year. And you know how that came out. I don’t have the slightest idea how to make a banjo. I don’t have instructions. I can’t use tools — ”
“Stop right now, Jeremiah Birnbaum!” said Luella in her best schoolteacher voice. “All I hear is I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. Do you think that’s what the Wright brothers said before they built their airplane? Or what Louis Pasteur said before he invented moisturizing?”
“Pasteurizing.”
“Whatever. The point is there’s a first time for everything. Now are you just going to sit there? Or are you going to build yourself a stupid banjo?”
Jeremiah looked at Luella. His eyes grew wide.
“Come on!” he said.
For the first time ever, Luella had trouble keeping up with Jeremiah. He sprinted out of the tennis court and wound through the maze with its ten-foot-high hedges. He hurled himself under the waterfall and leapt over the miniature train that chugged through the tropical flower garden.
At last he skidded through the side door of the house and raced past the cook, who brandished a dripping spoon at him. He flew up the back staircase to the third floor. He ran down the hall, slid around the corner and threw himself into his enormous leather desk chair.
His computer flickered to life.
Jeremiah and Luella looked at the screen as he started to search the internet. They saw pictures of banjos — fancy banjos all carved and decorated with inlay, and banjos that were plain as could be. They found pictures of banjos played during the American Civil War, and banjos recently made in a factory.
And they found homemade banjos. Banjos made a hundred years ago and banjos made just yesterday.
“Look at that one,” Jeremiah said. “It says the builder stretched the skin of a groundhog over the drum part. Am I going to have to hunt a large rodent and kill it?”
“If it was a contest between you and the groundhog, I’d bet on the groundhog,” Luella said. “Let’s keep looking. How come it has that peg or tuner or whatever part way down the neck?”
“That’s the fifth string,” Jeremiah said. “The drone string. You pluck it with your thumb. It’s one of the things that makes the banjo unique.”
“Wait,” Luella said. “That one.” She pointed to the screen.
The banjo that Luella pointed to was about the plainest there was. It had a very simple headstock. It had a flat neck without any frets — the thin metal strips where a person pressed his fingers to get the right note. But Jeremiah knew that banjos in the old days didn’t have frets. Some of the players he listened to played without them. He liked the way they could slide their fingers to make the notes bend up or down.
The banjo Luella pointed at also had a body made out of a cookie tin.
A cookie tin? It was hard to believe. But a tin was round like the body of a banjo. Instead of a stretched skin, the bridge rested on the back of the tin.
It seemed a little weird, but at least he wouldn’t have to kill a groundhog.
“I think — maybe — I could make a banjo like that,” Jeremiah said.
4
What a Broken Chair Is Good For
JEREMIAH PRINTED off photos and plans from the internet. That was the first step. The next was to gather up the necessary materials.
Since his parents had forbidden him to buy a banjo, he didn’t think he should buy any of the materials, either. So he had to find everything he needed. After all, wasn’t that what a lot of banjo players did a hundred years ago?
Finding a metal cookie tin turned out to be easy. There was one in the pantry with only three cookies left in it. It was a pretty tin, decorated on the sides with old winter scenes of people skating on a pond and sledding on white hills.
After Jeremiah ate the cookies, he said to the cook, “I guess you don’t need this old tin.”
“What would I need it for? Keeping all my love letters? Now you skedaddle out of my kitchen.” She waved a spatula at him, as if this time she might really tap him on the nose. Jeremiah tucked the cookie tin under his arm and ran up to his room.
He had his banjo pot!
Finding the wood for the instrument’s neck wasn’t quite so easy. It had to be at least twenty inches long. Since Jeremiah didn’t know how to use any tools, the piece of wood had to be pretty close to the right size already. Straight and flat for the fingerboard. Narrow but not too narrow.
Jeremiah hunted around the four-car garage, but all he found was a pile of logs to feed the three fireplaces. Maybe a Tennessee woodsman could hack one into a banjo neck with his ax, but Jeremiah certainly couldn’t.
He went down to the basement and found some lengths of cedar left over from the walls of the sauna. But cedar was too soft. He’d read on the internet that he needed a hardwood, or the neck would bend from the force of the string tension.
Jeremiah took walks along the road, hoping to find just the right piece of wood. He looked in trash cans and behind garages. But all he found was a cracked ping-pong paddle, a portable hair dryer with a missing cord, and a torn lamp shade.
Whatever a person might make out of those things, it wasn’t a banjo.
One day after school he was crossing the grounds of the house. Feeling discouraged, his hands deep in the pockets of his uniform jacket, he came across the family gardener.
Wilson was tall, skinny and tanned from working outside. He carried a folded-up wooden lawn chair under his arm.
“Hey, Jeremiah, what’s shaking?”
“Not much. What’s with the chair?”
“Busted. The seat’s ripped and one of the folding hinges rusted and broke. It served its masters well but now it has to go to the chair cemetery. That is, the garbage dump.”
“Can I see it?”
Jeremiah took the chair from Wilson and looked it over. The legs on it were flat on the sides, looking kind of like giant Popsicle sticks. The back legs were longer.
Maybe long enough. Maybe wide enough, too.
“You look pretty deep in thought,” said Wilson.
“Do you think that’s a hardwood?” he asked.
“Must be, otherwise the chair wouldn’t have been able to hold up your uncle Mel, if you know what I mean. Maybe maple.”
“Then I think I have a way to recycle this chair. I think it still has some life in it.”
“As the saying goes,” Wilson said, “one man’s junk is another man’s gold.”
•••
THE GOAL OF Fernwood Academy was to encourage not only academic excellence but “well-rounded young men and women with practical skills for real life.” Students took culinary arts in one semester and industrial design the next — what regular schools called cooking and shop.
Jeremiah had rather liked cooking. Mixing ingredients reminded him of making potions as a little kid, when the cook had allowed him to pour just about anything into a bowl, mush it about and put it in
the oven. (He remembered insisting that Monroe sample his Tuna-Pea Soup-Chile Pepper-Chocolate Surprise.) In class he had made lopsided zucchini muffins and runny goat-cheese omelets.
Shop was a different matter. The blowtorches and electric sanders scared him. His last project, a wire key rack, had ended up looking like the skeleton of some small extinct animal.
Luella, on the hand, was good at shop. Her parents actually used her key rack.
“This year,” said Ms. Threap, the shop teacher, “we’re going to continue the rack theme. Only this time we’re all going to make wine racks. Won’t that be fun and useful? Won’t your moms and dads be thrilled to have a place to store their chardonnays and pinot noirs?”
“My parents drink beer,” whispered Luella.
“Less talk and more work,” said Ms. Threap.
Jeremiah knew this was his chance. He was a little afraid of Ms. Threap, who barked like a drill sergeant and wore earrings that looked like miniature power saws. He looked back at Luella, who gave him an encouraging nod.
“Ms. Threap?”
“Yes, Larry?”
“Jeremiah.”
“That’s what I said. What can I do you for?”
“I was wondering if I could make something else for my project.”
“Something else?” Ms. Threap put her hands on her hips. “A wine rack not good enough for you, eh? You want to build maybe a houseboat? Or a jet engine?”
“I want to build a banjo.”
“I’m sorry, Larry, but you’d better stick to the wine rack. Unless you’d like to try to make another key rack. Perhaps one that doesn’t look like a rat trap.”
“I really want to make a banjo,” he said. “I’ve got the material. I’ve even got some plans and pictures.”
“Plans? Now that’s a horse of a different color. Let me see them.”
Jeremiah hurried to pull the plans from his briefcase. Ms. Threap spread them out on a work table.
“Well, this doesn’t look too hard,” she said. “Not with a little assistance from yours truly.”