“I’ve got a piece I want you to hear,” he said. It was Mozart’s Requiem Mass. “Listen to this. Just come sit here and listen for a minute. This is incredible.” He sat in one chair; I sat in another. I didn’t know then what I know now. It was impossible to keep up.

  “What are they saying?”

  “Day of wrath, day of anger. It doesn’t matter what they’re saying. Great trembling there will be. Listen to the music.”

  I listened.

  “This sounds like a musical re-creation of World War II.”

  “It’s Mozart, for god’s sake.”

  “If you say so,” I said. “What language is this?”

  “It doesn’t matter!” He got up and began to move dramatically around the room. “Learn this for me,” he said, now out of breath, still dancing and flailing his arms maniacally about like a deranged conductor.

  Mother yelled down from upstairs: “Henry!”

  And then his darkness returned. Without a word, he stopped the music, climbed the spiral staircase to the library, and was gone.

  Mother came softly down the front stairs and walked over to where I was sitting. “You know I don’t mind your playing at this hour as long as you play quietly,” she said. “Sometimes it helps me sleep. It’s really lovely. I’m sorry. What were you playing before?” She didn’t wait for an answer and drifted away from me to ascend the stairs again a ghost like Father.

  Halfheartedly now, with muted strings, I played, afraid to disturb. Father’s desk light had gone out. He’d finally gone to bed. The quiet of the house fell full upon me and the piano could not sound again until morning. I walked to the lamp in the Great Room and then saw Threnody lying on the floor, looking down through the railing encircling the library, watching me, just as I used to watch Father when he played. She smiled at me and waved and I smiled back.

  “Hey, little Bird.”

  “Hey.”

  “What are you doing up?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.” She was whispering through the railing.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I think so.”

  I asked her if she wanted me to make her a snack.

  “No, I’m okay. Is it too late for you to tell me a story?”

  I was tired and knew it was too late, but I said, “I think we have time for a story, don’t you?”

  “I think so.”

  We met in her bedroom and I tucked her in. In a nook in the far wall was a desk, and above the desk were three shelves set into the wall. Threnody had plundered Father’s book collection and many of the stolen books were lined up alphabetically on these shelves as if they now belonged to her. These were her favorite books, and we read them over and over again. I sat on the chair next to the bed and the familiar emptiness grew inside me.

  She closed her eyes and pulled the covers up around her neck and said, “I’m ready.”

  “Do you want me to read you a story or tell you a story?”

  “Tell me a story.” She was almost asleep.

  I thought for a long time and couldn’t think of a good story, so I just started talking and this is what I said:

  “Once upon a time there was a great tree that stood at the top of a great hill and looked out over all the land. In years forgotten the tree had been but a tiny green seed, but over time it began to grow tall and strong, until it was the tallest and the strongest of all the trees on the great hill. The tree had a friend: a quiet little crow who came to sit in the tree’s branches once the tree had grown tall. And they grew older together, but the tree was much older than the crow. Together, each day, they watched as the sun rose and moved across the sky, and they watched until darkness came to the great hill, and in the darkness the crow would hide from the starlight in the branches of the great tree and close his eyes for sleep. One night when the crow was sleeping a terrible storm came, and then another. Lightning came down from the sky. All around the great hill the other trees burned and fell, leaving only the one great tree, and the quiet little crow, to sit at the top of the hill and look out over all the land and watch the sun move across the sky. One day the crow said, I hope you live forever, my dear friend. And the tree responded, My dear friend, I cannot live forever. A year passed, and still the crow sat in the branches of the great tree. Again he said, I hope you live forever, my dear friend. And the tree said, My dear friend, I will not live forever. Another year passed, and still the crow sat in the branches of the great old tree. He said again, I hope you live forever, my dear friend. And this time the great old tree did not answer. Yet the tree still stands, and the quiet little crow still sits among its branches. The sun, it passes without notice.”

  I sat in silence for a moment to make sure Threnody was asleep. When she didn’t stir, I turned out the light and sat for another minute in the dark listening to the wind outside.

  From under the covers, a small voice said, “Henry?”

  “Yes, Bird.”

  “I’m glad you’re still here. I was just checking.” She peeked out from under her blankets and, satisfied I was not an illusion, tucked herself back in again.

  “I’m still here.”

  “What are you doing? Why are you just sitting there?”

  “I didn’t want to wake you up,” I said.

  “Henry?”

  “Yes, Bird?”

  “I don’t want you to die.” She was crying.

  “I know, Bird. I’m not going to die. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise you that wherever I go, you’ll go, too. We’ll be together and we’ll always have each other.”

  “Okay. That’s good.”

  “Go to sleep now,” I said. “It’s late and I know you’re tired. The morning’s going to come early.”

  “Will you sing me a song?”

  “Yes, I’ll sing you a song.”

  —

  On this day, two lifetimes later, there was just emptiness where before there had been so much life. There was no one upstairs, and no one at the railing looking down. The piano, somehow, was not horribly out of tune, a fact I chalked up to the location of it deep inside the house. By nightfall I was still at the piano, now with one empty bottle of wine, one partially consumed bottle of wine, and an open bottle of vodka. There were glasses in the house, but I chose not to use them. I hadn’t eaten a thing all day. Loneliness had crept into the dark and the house felt cold. The muscles in my back burned and were numb with the alcohol. Music books spread out across the face of the piano, on top of it, and surrounded me on the floor. I’d thrown one or two at the wall; these lay on the floor like great birds fallen from the sky. I played Chopin’s A-minor mazurka, the opening chords so simple and so beautiful—1-2-3 1-2-3 1-2—the same piece Father played when I was a child. I played the nocturne in C-sharp minor, which begins in sadness, moves to bittersweet remembrance, and then returns again to sadness.

  After a time I’d consumed enough wine and vodka to make my playing stupidly inaccurate. The piano, old and disconsonant, began to jangle like a band of drunken minstrels. The keys struck and raked upon the wires and grated upon my ears. My Aeolian lute! Without thought my hands fell upon the first black chord of Chopin’s marche funèbre. I stopped as the sound slowly died away; I could play no more.

  I walked out onto the porch overlooking the courtyard and down into the well of the valley beyond. It was one thirty in the morning, and, as usual, I was the only one awake. Light from my candles inside spilled red into the night. I was in the eye of the vulture. A car made its way along the dark gravel road in the valley—a curious sight at this hour in this moribund town of no earthly consequence in the persistent autumn of its bleak existence. I hoped without reason that I was getting an unexpected visitor to assuage my loneliness, but the car passed and its faint light and sound disappeared over the next hill. The night was now quiet; noise from the piano hummed in my ears and in my brain.

  I am here, and I am alone.

  Looking up, I saw the stars.

  I got up the following morning, put on a coat and tie, and headed down to see Charles Young. I made my way into town and observed not with any surprise that it looked no different in the daylight hours than it had two nights before. A cool fog lay upon the town and clothed everything in gray. The Barrowfields lay off to the left—a wasteland of nothingness as far as I could see, with naught but a single wooden bench at its perimeter, now scarcely a decoration. A visitor to the town might assume that everyone who had ever lived in Old Buckram was buried there in the Barrowfields, but the mossy tombstones were but the petrified stumps of trees that were felled by some great force nigh the time of Christ and were afraid to grow again. I reminded myself that it was still summer somewhere, and that I could drive down the mountain to find the sun again and have warmth on my face before too much longer.

  The law firm was located on Main Street, directly across from the county’s only funeral home, whose plain brick face stared out from behind three incongruous white Doric columns. The firm was brought into existence in 1922 by Mr. Trafton Ignatius Brown III, who had received a law degree from the University of Virginia and had begun practicing law in the mountains of North Carolina when the population hardly supported it. His first law office had one room, one desk, and an old woodstove, but it did not have plumbing and therefore did not have a bathroom. Mr. Brown had to go across the street to the funeral home for this need. In exchange, he handled the funeral home’s simple legal matters when they arose.

  Charlie was now the sole surviving partner, having carried on the law practice despite the comings and goings of several partners and junior associates through the years. It was hard to build a large law practice in the mountains. There just wasn’t enough paying work to support it.

  When I walked in, a bell affixed to the back of the door sounded. The receptionist heard the bell and looked up.

  “This is my lucky day,” she said, rising from her desk. She came over to where I was standing just inside the entryway. Her name was Sylvia, and I’d known her for years, from before and during my father’s tenure of practice with the firm. She gave me a long hug and I thought I saw her brush away a tear. She stepped back and looked at me sideways as if to gauge my height.

  “It’s so good to see you. I can’t believe it. You’re all grown up. I haven’t seen you since you were this high!” She pointed a finger into my chest. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m well,” I said. “I’m glad to be here for the summer—or for however long it winds up being.”

  “Well, we’re glad you’re here, too. Charlie’s on the phone, but I’ll let him know you’re here.”

  The lobby was clean and neat, but it was far from ostentatious. On one wall was a framed copy of the Declaration of Independence. On another was a painting of ubiquitous “lawyer art” that must be sold out of a catalog that all lawyers get in the mail (I can only suppose). It was titled A Country Lawyer, and it depicted a client consulting with his attorney in a law office that had disheveled stacks of paper here, there, and everywhere. It’s pretty close to the truth, I came to find out. In the corner of the lobby was a stack of magazines that were a few years old. The thin maroon carpet showed a worn path from the front door up the steps leading to Charlie’s office.

  Sylvia told me that she missed my father working there.

  “Thank you for saying that,” I said. “I know he enjoyed working here.”

  “He was always very kind. His mother brought him up right, I know that. He was always polite and he treated me like I was his equal, just like Charlie does. He treated me with respect, and not everybody does that. When you went in to talk to him and you had a problem, he listened. He was better at dealing with people than anyone I’ve ever known. He had a real gift for it.” Hearing things like this always surprised me. It was hard to reconcile these words with the man I had known.

  Charlie came down the stairs to greet me. He shook my hand pleasantly and looked at me with genuine concern. He wasn’t a tall man, but he carried himself with a quiet confidence that could be intimidating. He didn’t speak often, but when he did a room would grow quiet and people would listen. He was a good lawyer, but most of all, he was a good man, and an honest man, and a kind man.

  I followed him back up to his office. It was the office of a working lawyer. There were no stained-mahogany bookcases; there was no ebony wood paneling. There was no improbably clean, high-gloss desk topped by an expensive lamp. Charlie’s desk was hardly visible. It was obscured by a mountain range of file folders stacked five or six deep, papers extruding in all directions. In one corner of the office there might have been a hundred rolled-up surveys, many of them faded with time. A cheap wood-and-metal easel guarded several poster-board trial exhibits from trials long since passed. A row of banker’s boxes made up one wall of the office. Many of them were labeled “Sheets v. Old Buckram Electric,” written neatly with a Magic Marker. On his bookcase were the brown books containing decisions by the North Carolina Supreme Court and the green books with decisions of the North Carolina Court of Appeals, along with a set of the North Carolina General Statutes from 1985. He also had Webster’s Real Estate Law in North Carolina and a Robinson on Corporations and Douglas’s Forms and a book of pattern jury instructions and a treatise on wills and several other books on all the subjects known to the general practitioner, and I can tell you these books were not just for show. They were all well read. Charlie wasn’t the kind of lawyer to wing anything. There is no telling how many hours he spent alone in that office at night, bent over one or another of those books, trying to understand some arcane facet of the law.

  He blew out his cheeks. “After thirty-five years of doing this, I think I’m just about finished.” He spoke with a convincing “aw shucks” southern accent that he might have exaggerated from time to time just from habit. People in the mountains mistrust fast talkers, and slow, deliberate speech is seen by people as more trustworthy somehow. Over time, if you want to communicate effectively, you just start to do it. He looked up at his law-school diploma and his eyes ran down the rows of framed accolades, all in modest frames. “I’ll probably retire in another few years. They say that lawyers don’t retire, they just die—but this one’s going to. Retire.”

  “You think?”

  “I think so. It’s hard. It’s awfully damn hard. Let me tell you: When you care about what you’re doing, and you worry about your cases at nights and on the weekends and on vacation, it takes its toll on you after a while. Listen to this. Do you know I’d been litigating for more than thirty years when it occurred to me that I don’t even like controversy?”

  I laughed and he said, “I’m not kidding. Well, I don’t have to tell you. I wish I could tell you something different, but if I did, I’d be lying to you. Look at me. When I started, I had a head full of hair. This ain’t because I have a genetic predisposition to baldness.” He might have had four hairs on the top of his head.

  “Do you have any big trials coming up?”

  “One or two in September and October I need to start working on. You can help me get ready.”

  “I’d like that.”

  We sat for a minute as the topic we had been avoiding wormed its way into our collective consciousness and broke into the silence.

  “I know it must be strange for you to be sitting here,” said Charlie. “I’m still so sorry about your dad—” he began, but I cut him off.

  “Thank you, Charlie,” I said. “I know.”

  For the first several days of my employment, Charlie didn’t have much for me to do, so he had me organize some files here and there, which basically meant putting things in chronological order. I went to court with him once or twice for small matters and he introduced me to everyone at the courthouse, from the judge to the clerk of court, all the way down to the bailiff and the janitor. The judge called him Charlie and everyone else called him Mr. Young and he was kind and very polite to all of them in equal measure.

  On Friday afternoon Charlie came into my makeshift office and sat down. He looked at me for a long time before he said anything. Then he said, “You know that a lot of people here can’t pay us anything.” I said I figured that was the case.

  He said, “We have a whole closet downstairs full of food and other things that people have brought in so they can pay something toward their bill. A lot of the food people bring in is good. Very good, in fact.” He put his hands on his stomach.

  “I thought that was just in To Kill a Mockingbird.”

  “No, no. It’s right here. I guess you know as well as anybody, but I can tell you that, notwithstanding your daddy’s first good lick on that big case of his when he first started, you’ll never get rich practicing law. If you work at it, you can make a decent living. But you’ll never get rich. Not if you do it honestly.”

  We sat for a moment in silence.

  “So remind me why you’re here in Old Buckram when you could be anywhere else. Are you going to try to get that old house ready to sell?”

  “I think so.”

  “You’ve got your work cut out for you, son. That’s a big house, and it’s been empty a long time. I wish I knew somebody who’d buy it.”

  “It’s hard to imagine anyone would want it,” I said.

  Charlie nodded and looked out the window. After a long minute, he turned back to me and said, “How are you doing?” He had a keen way of looking at you with a discernment that was at times unsettling; he did it in a way that made you be honest with yourself.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “But I’ll be better in a few months, I’m sure.”

  “Do you have any idea what you want to do this summer? As I said before, we’ll pay you for your time.”

  “I can’t accept money from you.”

  “Then I’m not going to let you work here. If you’re working here, you’re going to get paid for it. But believe me—I’m not going to pay you much, so you won’t have to feel too bad about it.” He laughed. “Now get your stuff because you’re coming over for dinner. Sarah is cooking you something special. She can’t wait to see you.”

 

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