The father of the girlfriend of Dustin is named Carl Burnett, and he sells trucks in Crossville, and he knows a signature when he sees one. He stood by the workbench with the sheet of paper in his thick hand and looked down at the page beneath it, the photocopy of the pattern book with the first banjo I ever drew, in 1966, in pencil, on the back of a feed sack. “Bilbrey Five String,” he read. “Property of the Mountain Strings Guitar Company. Purchase price, four million, nine hundred thousand dollars.” He raised his eyes. “Herschel. You are the Bilbrey of Bilbrey banjos. My father owned one. He played it every night until the day he went.”
The store had stopped moving. Nobody had told the band to stop, but the banjo player had set down his instrument, and the fiddle had followed, and now there was only the hum of the cooler and the faint ringing of a wire in the corner. Dustin stood at the center of the room holding the mandolin by the neck, a tall, sandy haired man of thirty nine in a flannel shirt, with the lean, sullen good looks of a boy who has never had to finish anything. “Uncle Herschel,” he said, “I am going to ask you one more time. Not tonight.” “It is already tonight,” I said gently. “And I would like to know why you took the pattern book.”
He set the mandolin on the stool with great care, as if it might go off. “I took the jigs because they were sitting there,” he said. “And the bench. And the necks, because I thought, he will never miss them. But the book.” He looked at the floor. “The book I took because I wanted to know how you did it. Ten years at your bench, and you never let me read it. You kept it in a drawer with a lock. You said, you will learn it with your hands.” His voice cracked. “I have good hands, Uncle Herschel. I do. And I wanted to see on paper that I was not just a hired boy.”
A pattern book of banjo drawings lay on an old walnut workbench in a music store and gave one banjo maker the evening to bring his nephew back to the shop.
Carl Burnett cleared his throat. “Son,” he said to Dustin, “is the shop even open? Is this a real store, or is it a showroom for stolen goods?” Dustin flinched. “It is open. We have sold eleven instruments.” “Whose?” Carl asked. “Whose banjos have you sold?” The young man said nothing. “Herschel,” Carl said, turning, “I think I know what happened. I think the boy took your tools and your necks and your drawings and has been finishing what you left half built and selling it with his name on the headstock.” I looked at Dustin. He did not deny it. He had the look of a man who has been caught by a mirror.
I walked to the bench. It was the bench of my father, walnut, black from sixty years of hands, and I laid my palm on the old wood. I have not often said a thing aloud that I felt in my chest. “Dustin,” I said, “come here.” He came. “Put your hand on this.” He did. “Your grandfather and my father were brothers. They built this bench in the winter of 1958, in a barn that is not there now. The wood came from a tree that fell across the road. My father said, a man who works at a bench like this does not need to lie, because the bench will tell on him.” The boy was weeping. “It is telling on you now.”
I took my time. I thought about the sixty years of my life, and what I wanted to leave on a bench in a store on a square, and whether it was punishment or something else. “Here is what will happen,” I said. “The bench goes back to the shop on Broad Street on Monday, with the jigs, the molds and the press. So do the necks, finished or not. The pattern book goes back in its drawer, which belongs now to the guitar company, but I have a friend there. I will ask if you may read it.” He lifted his head, dazed. “Read it?” “With me beside you. One page a week. In the shop. As my apprentice, not my nephew.”
“You would do that?” he said. “After what I did?” “Dustin,” I said, “I am seventy seven. I have no son to leave the craft to, and the guitar company will make banjos on a line with a computer. I would like one man who knows what a neck feels like when it is right.” I closed his fingers around the corner of the bench.
“You have the hands. I have always known it. What you lacked was a reason to use them honestly.” He bent over the walnut and put his forehead against the wood and stayed there. The band, after a while, began very softly to play again. It was an old tune, Cripple Creek, slow, with a catch in it.
Carl Burnett bought a banjo that night. It was a Bilbrey, from the back of the store, one of the dozen unfinished necks that Dewey and I strung by hand over the following week. He paid full price, and when I told him I would not take it, he put the check in the cigar box on the counter. “For the apprentice fund,” he said. “Somebody ought to have one.” On the first Monday in December, Dustin appeared at the shop on Broad Street at six in the morning with a thermos and a pair of work gloves. He stood in the doorway, uncertain. I handed him a plane and a block of maple.
He has been there four years. He builds banjos now, three a month, and every one has a small mark inside the pot where only the player will see it, an owl, in pencil, because of the name of the town where we first met a bluegrass band. The pattern book stays in its drawer at the guitar company, and once a month a woman in an office opens it and slides it across to him, one page at a time. He copies it by hand in a notebook. On the last page, I understand, there is a space for the name of the maker. I have told him he may sign it, when the time comes.