Free Grand Change by William Andrews

was on then, and it raged, with the smacked crossing to the opposite side until one side gained the upper hand through attrition. Finally, Urban Gallant stood alone, jumping, dodging, slipping and kicking up his feet, with an all-out volley zeroing in until he suddenly turned into a leopard. Then we had an all-out, pelt-in-your-face, throw-down-your-neck tangle. And there was Wally at close quarters, lining me up, with his mouth open—and I half crammed, half threw in a loose gob of dirty slush. We went home in different sleighs that afternoon.
    I didn’t know whether I should go to the Masons’ that night or not, but I wound up going. Wally was sitting on the stove tank whittling on a stick, scowling with his jaw jutting out. He didn’t speak, didn’t even look at me.
    I talked awhile with Joe about the weather. Mabel was sewing a patch to the seat of a pair of overalls, her long fingers working the needle and thread, her thin shoulders slightly hunched, a set of square glasses perched on the end of her long, pointed nose. Jenny, who I found pretty in a skinny sort of way, with her pert nose, long, red hair and blue eyes, did her homework at the table as if I didn’t exist and never would.
    I kept eyeing Wally, sizing him up before I spoke. I finally took a chance. “Well, Wally, going to have a tune?” I said.
    He didn’t answer; just went on whittling. I waited. Finally, he climbed off the tank and shuffled toward the door to the attic stairs. “You coming?” he grumped, halfway to the door.
    We were barely getting started when Wally stopped and said, “You’re out of tune.”
    â€œYou’re still sore about what I said, ain’t you?”
    â€œAin’t sore about nothing. Get in tune.” We went through the tuning for a while, the plunks of the fiddle and the up and down wings of the guitar strings augmenting the gloom of the shadows on the wall, the feeble candlelight hitting the side of Wally’s face, making his scowl grotesque. After he hitched around a bit, we finally started off.
    There are times in learning activity, music or whatever, when things just hit home. Maybe it was because Wally was miffed and forgot himself; maybe it was incentive brought on by the upcoming concert; maybe it was just timing. Whatever the case, for two star-gazers in Joe Mason’s attic that night, their lips blue and their fingers stiffening with the cold, things hit home and “The Barley Corn Reel,” though not in the full sail of a schooner, at least in the steady chop of a row boat, took off. I’d say the continuation record for “The Barley Corn Reel,” with Wally sawing away, his jaw set firm, a devious, victorious glint in his eye, and me dinging my best, was eternally broken.
    When we finally stopped, Wally blew on his fingers and said, “We ain’t doing nothing but ‘The Barley Corn Reel’ right up to the concert.”
    I held my fingers over the candle. “Wouldn’t it be safer to go with ‘Saint Anne’s Reel’?” I said.
    â€œNope, not fancy enough.”
    â€œWe better go another round and get out of here before we freeze up solid.”
    â€œOkay,” Wally said, with the fiddle under his chin again. “Here we go. Old Tyme Fiddle Champ, Fiddling Wally Mason with Picking Jake Jackson: ‘The Barley Corn Reel.’”
    The first day at the hall, we were an entity unto ourselves, as far as we were concerned: sitting by the pot-bellied stove, glowing red around its ring, and listening to the older girls harmonizing “Noël” on the short steps leading to the stage, Bob Scovie’s random plunks at the keys of the piano standing kitty-corner to the stairs, and now and then the rattle of hard coal scuttling into the stove and the door shutting to the clang of the coal scoop—all echoing in the high-ceilinged room smelling of old varnish, burning coal dust and