“…Room 512,” Dr. Pryor said again, and he picked the harmonica off the tray and closed my good hand around it, because my other hand was wrapped in a half stitched mess of gauze. “I will finish your hand in ten minutes, Mr. Briggs. I promise. But please, will you come upstairs with me first? My mother has been waiting forty years, and she may not have many more weeks.” I did not even answer. I stood up off that gurney with my sleeve still rolled and one hand held in the air like a boy with a question, and I followed him down the hall.
The elevator smelled of floor wax and cold coffee. Dr. Pryor told me, watching the numbers climb, that his mother was Ruth Ellen Pryor, eighty two years old, born in Harlan County, a retired nurse, in the hospital with her heart. She had never let him play that harmonica for anyone but her. She kept it in a drawer, wrapped in a handkerchief. When he turned eighteen she said, “You find the A.B. man and you give it back with your own two hands. That is the only thing I want.” He had searched pawn records, church rolls, even the coal company pension office. He had found nothing, until I walked in with a cut hand.
Room 512 was quiet and full of sun. She lay propped on three pillows, a small white haired woman with a face like a winter apple and a thin tube at her nose. She turned her head when we came in. Her eyes were pale blue and very sharp. They went straight to the harmonica in my hand, then to my face, then to the scratched letters. “Amos,” she whispered. And then, with a small shake of her head, as if she had caught herself: “No. You are his boy. You have his chin.”
A silver harmonica with two scratched letters, a hospital room upstairs, and a woman who had waited forty years.
“Your daddy wrote that tune for me, Walter,” she said, and the breath went out of me. “Not for your mama. For me.” I sat down in the visitor chair. She told it slowly, with breaks for air. In 1958 she was nineteen, a cousin of my mother, also named Ruth, and she and Amos Briggs had met at that church social, and he had played her four notes on his harmonica and she had hummed the rest. “He was twenty. We were going to marry. But the next morning I left for nursing school in Knoxville, on a scholarship I had waited two years for, and he told me to go.”
“He waited a year,” she said, “and then he did the wise thing. He married my cousin Ruth, the girl who stayed. She was a good woman. I was at the wedding. They let the song belong to both of us, because nobody could tell which Ruth he meant, and he made sure nobody ever would. That was your father, Walter. He never took a thing from anybody.” She wiped her eyes with the back of a thin hand. “Your mother knew. She told me so at the wedding. She said, Ruthie, I will never ask him which one. And she never did.”
“Open the plate,” she said. “He told me once, if that harmonica ever needed to go home, there would be something under the cover.” Dr. Pryor handed me a tiny screwdriver from his pocket. With my one good hand and his help, I took out the four little screws. Under the silver cover plate, tucked in the reed chamber, was a slip of onionskin paper folded in eighths, yellow as straw. I opened it on the blanket. My father pencil, small and square: “Son, if you are reading this, you sold it, and I forgive you. Everything I owned was a song. I gave it to two women. Give it to whoever needs it next.”
I laughed. I could not stop. I had carried forty four years of shame like a sack of coal, and it was a slip of paper that said I forgive you. I laughed until I cried, and then Dr. Pryor was crying, and a nurse put her head in the door and took it back out again. Ruth Ellen reached for my hand. Her fingers were light as a bird. “Play it,” she said. “I have only ever heard it played by a doctor. I would like to hear it played by a Briggs.”
“I do not know how,” I said. “Yes, you do,” she said. “Your daddy hummed it by your bed every night until you were seven. Your hands know it. Try.” I lifted the harmonica to my lips. It tasted of metal and old pennies. I blew a note, wrong, and another, wrong, and a third that rang out clean and true as a church bell, and then, I swear to you, my father four notes came out of my mouth in that sunny hospital room as if he had put them there himself. Ruth Ellen closed her eyes and hummed the rest.
Dr. Pryor finished my hand that afternoon, eleven stitches, very neat. Ruth Ellen went home the following week with a new heart medicine and a nurse who visits on Tuesdays. On Thursdays I drive over after my bus route with the harmonica in my pocket, and Nathan teaches me, a note at a time, the way his mother once taught him. I am terrible. I play like a goose with a head cold. Ruth Ellen sits in her chair by the window, laughing, and tells me I am improving.
At Christmas the school where I drive asked me to play something at the winter program. I stood on the gym stage in my bus driver jacket in front of three hundred children and parents, with my knees shaking. I told them it was a song my father wrote for two women. Then I played four notes, and then eight, and then, to my own surprise, the whole tune. Afterward a little boy in the front row tugged my sleeve and asked, “Mister, is that really yours?” I said, “No, son. It belongs to whoever needs it next.”