“Money,” Austin finished, and he laid a small brown envelope in my lap with both hands. “Three hundred and forty dollars, Grandma. I was eleven. It was in the cigar box in the dresser of Grandpa, the money for your eyes, and I took it to buy a game for my phone. I hid the note in the guitar because I could not stand to have it in my pocket.” Mr. Reyes held the instrument gently, as if it might wake. “I found the second note by feel,” he said, “and had a student read it to me. I thought the family should hear it before anyone else did.”
Austin unfolded the second note and put it in my hand. In the square pencil of Buddy I read: Austin. I found your note. I counted the cigar box and I know what is missing. I am not angry. I was eleven once myself and took a pocketknife from a store in Amarillo. Your grandmother has worried about you since your daddy left, and I will not give her one more worry. I will put the money back myself. You owe me one thing. When you are a man, play me a song on this guitar, and play it for her. Grandpa. I read it twice before I could breathe.
I had wondered for years why my husband spent his last autumn mending fences and cutting grass for half of Lubbock when his heart was failing. Now I understood. He had been refilling the cigar box dollar by dollar, so that I would never learn my grandson had done a wrong thing. Buddy had carried the secret, and the cost of it, to his grave. I looked at the guitar on the knees of Mr. Reyes. I looked at Austin. He was crying openly, like a boy. “That is why I kept buying guitars,” he whispered. “I wanted to learn. I wanted to keep the promise. But every time I needed money, I sold them.”
A promise kept quietly by a grandfather can wait for a boy until he is old enough to play it.
Mr. Reyes spoke first, in his low even voice. “Mrs. Tilley, I would like to give this guitar back.” I put up my hand. “You paid for it fairly,” I said. “And the children need it.” I turned to my grandson. “Austin, a promise made to a dead man is still a promise. But it is not owed to the guitar. It is owed to the one who gave it, and to the one who kept the secret.” I faced Mr. Reyes again. “Sir, would you take a student?”
Mr. Reyes smiled and nodded. “I teach on Saturdays,” he said. “He will be the worst one in the class.” Austin laughed through his tears. “I begin at eight,” Mr. Reyes added. “Not eight thirty. Eight.” The next Saturday, my daughter drove him and sat in the car, and I am told she cried the whole way there. Mr. Reyes started him on the guitar held together with duct tape, the one the little boy had used. The first chord of Austin sounded like a gate swinging in a gale.
My daughter and I finally spoke at my kitchen table, with no company. “Mama,” she said, “I have let that boy drift for years because I was afraid to push. I asked him a hundred times to start a band, and never once to start a lesson.” I said, “Push now.” She laughed and wiped her face with a paper towel. She told me she had gone to the cemetery that morning and talked to her father for an hour, out loud, in the grass, like a madwoman. I said that was the sanest thing I had heard all year.
Winter came. Austin did not miss one Saturday. He played scales until his fingertips blistered and cracked. He stopped selling things. He took a job at the feed store, and paid me back the three hundred and forty dollars in an envelope I did not want, so I put it in a jar. At Christmas he played a carol at our table, slowly, and my daughter held her breath. He made three mistakes. Nobody at the table breathed. It was the best thing I have ever heard in my life.
In April, our church held its spring concert. The children from the school for the blind came in their best clothes, holding hands in a line. Mr. Reyes stood at the front with the guitar of Buddy. The little boy with the duct tape guitar sat beside him with a real instrument of his own, bought with a gift from the school board. He played a hymn, clear and brave, and then he whispered a name into the microphone. Austin walked up the aisle in a borrowed jacket.
He sat on a stool before three hundred people and held the guitar of his grandfather. His hands shook. He looked out over the pews until he found me, and he began. Blessed Assurance. It was slow, and a little crooked. He sang it in a cracked tenor. After the first verse, I could not help it. I rose from my pew on my bad hip and sang the harmony, the one I had sung beside Buddy for fifty years, thin and sweet and exactly on the note.
Afterward, Mr. Reyes found me in the churchyard among the bluebonnets. “It is a very good guitar, Mrs. Tilley,” he said. “It was only waiting.” I touched the capo, still clipped to the headstock where it had been for sixty years. “Buddy used to say a guitar is only wood until somebody sings,” I said. Behind me, my grandson was laughing with the children. For the first time in many years I could see every petal of every flower. And I heard my husband in each one.
