The Spyglass Tree (26 page)

So that’s my proposition, she said, and she said, All you got to do is get somebody in the string section of the Chapel Orchestra to give you a little start with a few rudiments and you’ll be fingering and reading and figuring all kinds of stuff out for yourself in no time at all. Because you see, I already know how you whistle and hum along and how you don’t just
keep
the time but also have to play around with it.

Which, she said, is exactly what made me change my mind. Because at first I was glad that you were not tied down to one instrument because you always listened to the whole band and not just for the place where your instrument comes in. But in this way I’m going to be able to hear you listening to everything all the time just like the drummer and like when the piano player is the one in charge like Duke and Count.

So what about it? she said as we came on by the old Strickland
place and up the slope to that end of the budding green campus, and I said that I had never thought about it like that, and then I said, Never is to be one to not try, Boss Lady, never no days like that.

We were there then, and she let me out on the empty ramp to the front entrance to the dormitory, and I stood with my arms around the neck and shoulders of the bass fiddle and waved and watched as she pulled on off along the campus mainline and went on out of sight around the knoll across from the promenade lawn and then to the turn-off that passed the dormitory where the clock tower was.

Then before going to my afternoon seminar, I had to take the bass fiddle upstairs to 359, which since the beginning of June almost nine months ago I had been lucky enough to have all to myself as my own turret-tall spyglass tree above but never apart from the also and also of either the briar patch itself or any of the blue steel and rawhide routes hithering and thithering toward the possibility, however remote, of patent leather avenues in beanstalk castle town destinations yet to come.