Free The Ragtime Kid by Larry Karp Page B

Campbell.”
    Stark raised his eyebrows. “You cleaned up pretty good, Brun. Now, let’s get you to work.”
    Even with the door open, the mid-afternoon temperature and humidity in the store were both well up into the nineties. Still, Brun always remembered that day as one of his happiest ever. He waited on customers, sold some guitar and mandolin strings, a couple of picks, and several pieces of sheet music. He showed a pretty little girl of about nine or ten how to work her way through a Beethoven piano sonata, then said, “Here’s what you can play when you finish your regular practice time,” and got her and her mother laughing to beat all through a lively “Buffalo Gals.” Afterward, Stark patted the boy on the back and said, “You’re a natural salesman, Brun. I’m bound to admit, you’ve got
me
sold.”
    Toward closing time, Stark gave his new clerk an eye-opener. The boy was showing a low-priced parlor guitar to a young woman of Raphaelitic proportions, when all of a sudden, Stark strode up, took the guitar from his clerk’s hands, and commenced to play a very creditable medley of “Old Dan Tucker” and “Weevily Wheat.” The old man sang along in that fine baritone voice, “I won’t have none of your weevily wheat, I won’t have none of your bar-ley.” Then he took a second guitar off the wall, and played the same tunes. “You hear the difference?” he asked the woman. “This guitar was made by the C. F. Martin Company, back in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, and it’s the best, bar none. For just an extra few dollars, your investment will come back to you many times over in musical pleasure and satisfaction.” The Martin guitar went out the door with the woman.
    “You’re a pretty good country salesman yourself, sir,” Brun said. “You sounded darned fine on that guitar.”
    “Huh! I’ve been playing those songs for fifty years and more. Don’t ask me to play any up-to-date tunes, or I will embarrass myself severely.”
    “Meaning no disrespect, sir, but I’d bet a man who plays guitar like I just heard could learn any song he set his mind to.”
    During the exchange, Isaac had walked to the front of the store. Stark scratched at his forehead, and chuckled. “I guess I’ve always had a knack for bringing music out of an instrument. I grew up on my brother’s farm in Indiana, learned banjo and guitar from the free colored, and piano from my sister-in-law. One day I found an old bugle in town, and I figured out how to make noises on that, well enough that when war broke out, I enlisted as a bugler. After the War, I homesteaded a while in northwestern Missouri, and if there’s a more dreary life on this earth, I don’t ever want to live it. Without my guitar to play of evenings, it would have been unbearable. I finally gave it up, and peddled Jesse French organs, so I had to learn to play those, too. There was a time I aspired to play music for a living, or perhaps teach at some academy, but my skills on any instrument were modest in respect to those goals. Which, I suppose, explains how it is I’m here today, running a music store.”
    “You was a mighty fine bugler.” Brun thought Isaac’s face said there was more to the matter, but Stark just coughed, walked over to the register, slipped on his spectacles and began going through receipts.
    A little after five, Brun helped Stark and Isaac close up, then took off toward the Y at a gallop. Not that he wanted to take the time, but he thought he’d be foolish to risk wearing his new suit outside the music store. Better to change into his old clothes before going down to the Maple Leaf Club to meet his piano teacher.
    ***
    Ohio Avenue, which divides east from west in Sedalia, had been a-bustle during Brun’s sprints back and forth between Stark’s and the St. Louis Clothing Store, but now all the banks, stores and offices were closed for the day, and the street was considerably more quiet. As Brun walked past the sandstone Missouri