A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me by David Gates

Author:David Gates [Gates, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-19T04:00:00+00:00

I could hear him singing to me—and how often did that happen anymore? So my idea was, you have the singer up there—a soprano, since you don’t want maleness to be an issue—and you see only this head, with white makeup like the Commendatore, and it’s singing from this place beyond this life but not in the next life either. I’d prefer that the singer shave her head, but I suppose that would have to be negotiable. As I say, I’ve been working toward working on it.

I don’t imagine you know the name Roberto Loomis, but they gave him an NEA a couple of years ago. He’s got CDs out on Lovely Music, which he always has them send me, and I’ll say this for him—his stuff is less unlistenable than mine. The reason I mention him, he was one of my students, back when he was Bob Loomis from somewhere in Idaho. At the time he came into my composition class, he was a death-metalhead who’d belatedly begun studying classical guitar; I got him listening to Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham. He emailed me the other day, to say he was organizing a festival in February, in Cozumel, and did I have anything he might consider. Well now: to have one’s work considered, and by Roberto Loomis no less. Was he looking to enhance his credibility by passing me off as a neglected master? Anything, please, but an act of kindness. At any rate, it’s given me some incentive to get on with this Ted Williams piece. For which one is obliged to feel grateful. Which in turn must account for the nasty tone one hears oneself taking.

—

I had washed the dishes and mowed the lawn, and the sun hung low over the hill, an hour from touching the treetops, which would be sweet Nature’s signal that the first drink might now be poured. I was sitting on the porch, going through Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero with a yellow highlighter, when a Mini Cooper with Rhode Island plates pulled into the dooryard. I got up to greet Jessamyn, and as she walked toward me I saw that she’d changed from her black dress into tight jeans, the tops of her thighs just touching, and a loose denim shirt. She turned around, as if to show me those womanly charms, and looked back at the graveyard. “Gran always used to say how she’d like to be buried up there,” she said. “So now she gets to be shipped out to fucking Harrisburg.”

“Is that where her family was from? Come on up and sit.”

“His family. She hated those people. That was Gramp’s sister—with the walker? I always thought she was a witch. Can I look in the barn first? We used to make hay forts in there.”

“My daughter did the same thing,” I said. “Great place to grow up. I always thought.”

“If you can deal with a little weirdness,” she said. “I mean, you know about our ghost.

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