High Cotton by Darryl Pinckney

tribute to his own talent and times would fall into Grandfather’s possession. Grandfather stuffed the huge single-spaced manuscript inside the dustbag of a vacuum cleaner, where it remained hidden until both he and his brother were dead.
     
    Uncle Castor liked to quote Edith Piaf when he backed me into a piano lesson: Remember where you came from and send the elevator back down. But I was lost the minute he began to get misty about contrapuntal devices, the rotary movement of his forearm, the special meaning of wrists thrown upward and high finger positions. The impromptu sessions were mostly a matter of his wiping my oily fingerprints from the keys. Uncle Castor relented and capped the tedium with stories: how his teacher dozed like a shrink until he felt the weight of the silence and snapped awake to tell him that his Czerny was unacceptable.
    The tutorials he offered me and my sisters were a form of singing for his supper. A week had gone by and Uncle Castor showed no sign of moving on. He sensed that there was a limit to the entertainment my parents and their friends derived from his demonstrations of how the open fourths and fifths of Nathaniel Dett’s “Jumba Dance” could be grafted onto another song, how the left-hand accompaniment gave it an open harmony and a foot-tapping beat. A rubato passage—he liked to lay on the lingo—of a Chopin prelude could also be taken uptown. “My improvisation
is weak” came across as an apology and a need to be reassured that he was not overstaying his welcome.
    In his embarrassment that he was still with us, Uncle Castor became timid and elderly. Though he made himself scarce, we could tell when he was out and when he was holed up in the extra room trying not to breathe, pretending that even his ego was dormant. He had learned the tactic of being unobtrusive from his life on the road. Upstairs, he was back in Ostend or Sheffield, in the seedy rooming houses where he’d been given a bed with the utmost reluctance and had to practice by silently running his fingers over any flat surface at hand.
    He let himself out in the afternoons, dressed in a vaguely zoot-suitish mode. “Man and nature scorn the shocking hat,” Grandfather always said. Uncle Castor came back after we had eaten, also a legacy from the time when band dates had lost their glamour. He occasionally accepted what was urged on him in the kitchen. He must have been surviving on pizza at the new place on the bad corner. It was the only place nearby and he never used his Studebaker. He once told me he had lived for years on brandied peaches.
    “Buster Brown came to town with his big old britches hanging down,” Buzzy whispered very close to my ear.
    Late at night Uncle Castor drifted along the walls like a daddy longlegs. I heard the bath fill very discreetly. The creak of the back stairs told me that Uncle Castor was on his way to the living room. I watched him from the front stairs, through the banister. He unpacked score paper and books. He’d shown me the choice calligraphy on several title pages that read “Paul at Samothrace.” An oratorio based on Shango cult themes, it was to be his apotheosis. Anyone could have guessed that he was touchy about having played “Sweet Georgia Brown” instead of Debussy on stage all those years.
    He moved his hands, but didn’t depress the keys. Perhaps he
was afraid to wake us. He made a stray mark or two with his pencil, one from a bundle that looked like the Italian Fascist emblem. He removed his shoes and stretched out on the sofa, one sheer sock hitting the other, making a sound like someone trying to strike a match as if to say this was what the paralysis of being both too afraid and too superior to compete looked like. Then he saw his address book. The number he dialed was a long one. “I haven’t seen a thing,” I heard him say softly. “There was an enormous tree. Today I looked and it was gone. They chopped it down. But it’s a lovely view.”