because it was a piano, an old upright, and I knew the second I saw it that somebody had loved it.
Not a fancy one. Scarred, water-ringed, the finish worn pale where a mans forearms had rested ten thousand times. But somebody had draped a bedsheet over it careful, tucked at the corners, the way you cover a thing you cannot bear to see hauled off. I called my husband over because my hands were shaking and I did not know why yet.
On top, inside the lid, was a cigar box, and in it a stack of paper covered in pencil, songs, whole songs, words and the little marks that mean music, all in the same hand. And a cassette tape, the old kind, labeled in that same pencil: FOR MY KIDS, IN CASE.
We drove to the truck and found a player and sat in the cab and listened. It was a man, just a man and this piano, singing. A rough, warm, honky-tonk voice, the Bakersfield kind, and between the songs he talked. Hello babies, he said. If youre hearing this your old man is either gone or fool enough to have lost the house, and either way I did not want you growing up not knowing my voice.
He sang them a lullaby he wrote. Then he said the thing that put my husband and me both in tears in that truck cab.
I never made it big and that is all right. I made you three, and that is the only hit I ever needed.
The unit went for thirty dollars because nobody else raised a hand, and I had thought that was my good luck. It was not luck. It was a family that lost everything and had to walk away from a mans whole heart because a piano is heavy and grief is heavier.
My husband thought this auction thing was a silly hobby, articles about people finding gold. Well, we found gold. Just not the kind he meant.
It took some work, but the songs had a name on them, and the name had grown children, scattered around Kern County. The oldest is a woman near fifty now. When I called and told her I had her daddys piano and a tape of his voice, she could not talk for a full minute. Their father played the honky-tonks around Bakersfield his whole life, never hit it big, and when the bad years came they lost the house and the piano with it, and she had spent thirty years thinking his songs were gone for good.
They are not gone. I would not sell that piano for any money. My husband and I rented a trailer and hauled it to her ourselves, and we all stood in her living room while that cassette played, and she heard her daddy say hello babies for the first time in thirty years.
Her own girl is learning his lullaby off the sheet music now. The man never made it big. But his song is being sung by a grandchild he never met, in a house he never saw, and if that is not making it, I do not know what is.