Travis laid the letter on the kitchen table, and I read it a third time in the yellow light over the stove, with my reading glasses pushed up into my hair. Jimmy had written it in ballpoint in 1987 on a page torn from a gas receipt pad, and he had folded it into the small pocket under the neck where a man keeps his picks and his secrets. To whoever gets this guitar after me, it began. Do not sell it to the first man with a checkbook.
In 1971, Jimmy wrote, he was eighteen years old and broke and sleeping in a truck outside a dance hall near Bandera, Texas, called the Pecan Springs. The owner, an old man named Hollis Tate, let him sweep the floor in exchange for supper. One Saturday the guitarist of the band did not show, and Hollis put the Gibson in the hands of Jimmy and said, “Son, play.” He played for four hours. At the end of the night Hollis wrapped the guitar in a feed sack and told him it was his, on one condition: that it never sit in a case for more than a month, and that when he was done, it go to someone who would play it and not sell it.
The letter ended with a request that took my breath. Tell Hollis I kept my word, it said, and if you can, go to Texas and play one tune on that floor for him. I looked up at my son. Travis had found the pocket only because he was checking the serial number for the appraiser, and he told me he had stood in the guitar room for a quarter hour before he dared bring it to me. “Mama,” he said, “I think Dad wrote this for you.” I did not trust my voice, so I only nodded.
The dealer in Tulsa had called me twice since the appraisal. A man of that kind does not say vintage, he says investment. His last offer was $40,000 in a cashier check, and he said it in a tone that suggested I should be grateful. That morning I called him back, thanked him for his time, and told him the guitar had obligations. He was silent so long I thought the line had gone dead. Then he said, “I wish more people said that.”
A gift given with a promise is never truly owned, only carried, and the honor is in handing it on still singing.
We left on a Friday before sunrise, Travis driving and Luis, my teacher from the music shop, wedged in the back seat with the guitar between his knees like a small sleeping passenger. Luis had never been to Texas and said so eleven times. We crossed the Red River at noon and ate chicken fried steak in a town whose name I never learned. I watched the fields go flat and gold and thought of Jimmy at eighteen, hungry and hopeful, driving the same road with nothing at all.
The Pecan Springs Dance Hall still stood outside Bandera under a tin roof and a pair of enormous live oaks, with strings of bulbs hung from the rafters. A woman in her fifties met us at the screen door. Her name was Rosalind Tate, and when I said the name of Jimmy and showed her the letter, she put her hand over her mouth. She took us into the office and opened a drawer. There was a photograph of 1971 in a cheap frame: an old man with a white mustache handing a guitar to a thin boy with a wild head of hair.
“My grandfather died in 1991,” she said. “Until the end he asked at Christmas whether the Oklahoma boy had ever written.” She opened a ledger and turned it toward me. In the line for the night of that Saturday, in pencil, he had written: Gibson to the Oklahoma boy. He will keep his word. I read it and could not see the page for a while. Travis put his arm around me. Luis found a napkin and handed it over without a word.
That night the hall held its monthly dance, and Rosalind asked, with great gentleness, if I might care to play. I had been learning for only two years. My hands were shaking so hard I dropped the pick. But the band waited, and the floor filled with couples, and I played the old waltz that Jimmy used to hum on the porch, slowly, with two mistakes in the bridge. Nobody cared. Luis came in on the second verse, and then Travis on bass, and a stranger with a fiddle, and the whole room moved like one animal in the yellow light.
When the last note faded, an old man in the corner stood up and took off his hat. Then the rest followed, couple by couple, and I understood that I was being thanked for something I did not do. I had only brought a promise home to the place it was made. I lifted the guitar a little, toward the rafters, toward the photograph on the wall, toward a thin boy with wild hair, and said aloud, “He kept his word, Mr. Tate.” My voice carried farther than I intended.
Back in Muskogee I did what the letter asked. I did not sell the guitar. I had it insured against fire and theft, for the sake of my children, and I wrote a rule on the inside of the case lid in marker: not in here for more than a month. Travis plays it at the Roadhouse on Fridays now, and I play it on Sunday afternoons at church, and Luis says that my bridge has improved. The dealer in Tulsa sent me a card at Christmas with no offer in it. I took that for a blessing.
Last week I wrote a letter of my own, on good paper, in my best hand. To whoever gets this guitar after me, it begins. I told the story of the Pecan Springs and the feed sack and the old man with the white mustache. Then I folded it and slid it into the pocket under the neck, next to the one from Jimmy, where two people who never met in this world now keep each other company in the dark. I hope the next hands are gentle. I hope they play.