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HEYWOOD , MASSACHUSETTS
 
The Connecticut River sounded different every season; it was a gushing stone roller during the spring runoffs, a narrow and quiet flow in the summer that in the fall receded to a thin clear wash leaving banks of leaf-covered mud and sunken tree root until winter, when the Berkshire snows came, and the ice formed over the rocks, and the water gurgled beneath it all as though behind a mask.
 
On its west bank, halfway through the trees up Saunders Hill, Jim Suther picked the guitar most every night. Though he was a white man he only sang blues songs, songs by men like Big Bill Broonzy, Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, and Champion Jack Dupree. After a supper he would cook for both himself and his seventeen-year-old son, Leo, Jim sat in the parlor on a stool in front of the window overlooking the woods and he’d start to play. He sang all kinds of songs, some fast that Leo could hear in the kitchen while he was cleaning up or doing his homework and he would tap his feet, or else slow ones like “Lonesome Road,”“Up, Sometimes Down,” and “Motherless Child.”Most times they were slow like that, and Leo would sit in the parlor and listen for a while.
 
He liked to watch his father’s face. That was easy to do because most times Jim kept his eyes closed while he picked and sang. Leo liked how soft it got around the mouth under his mustache, how tender-looking. And Jim was a big man. Not tall and lean like Leo, but wide with thick legs, rounded shoulders, and upper arms that always needed more room than his shirtsleeves gave them.
 
Wednesday nights, four or five men from Jim’s union at Heywood Paper Products would drive up in their Ramblers and station wagons to play poker at the kitchen table and drink cold Narragansetts out of cans. Leo was already taller than some of the men and they rarely talked to him like he was a junior at Heywood High School, graduating class of 1968.
 
One man, Lars,who was bald and had a clean-shaven pink face, he was always telling jokes about men screwing women who weren’t their wives. Sometimes he’d tease a punch as Leo passed the table on his way to the fridge and he’d say:“Hey Einstein, tell your pop to play some white music for a change.”Leo would smile and raise his Coke in a mock toast, then go out to the parlor where Jim was bluesing it with Leo’s Uncle Ryder. That’s what he liked Leo to call him, though he wasn’t really his uncle. One night Lars said to Ryder: “You’re so skinny I can smell the shit in you, Stillwell.” And Ryder was skinny. He also favored his left leg a little bit when he walked, and every day he wore his fake lizard-skin cowboy boots, even to the mill. But Wednesday nights he played the most wonderful instrument Leo could imagine on this earth: a German-made, M. Hohner Marine Band harmonica;The Harp of the Blues, Ryder called it.
 
He owned nine of them he kept in a wide leather harness around his waist. Most of these were in different keys though Leo knew four were in C, a bluesman’s standard. When Ryder played he liked to stand and he never opened his eyes at all, just cupped that silver mouth harp in his two hands, the left never moving, the right opening and closing, or staying still depending on the effect he was trying for. When Leo’s dad sang a train song, Ryder’s harp sounded like a freight liner chugging down the rails. He’d suck out a long wah-wah whistle like you imagine hearing after midnight when a diesel’s pulling through town with no one to appreciate it unless it makes some noise. Then when Jim picked and sang a Saturday night special like “Whoopin’ the Blues” or “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” Ryder would rock back and forth on his feet and put both lungs to work with trills and flutters, throat pops and hand smacks, all the while staying in perfect time with Jim’s guitar.
 
On songs like that, loud Lars and the other men would come in from the kitchen with their beers and smoking cigars. They’d tap their feet and let out a holler or two, and Jim and Ryder showed their appreciation by quickly sliding into two or three more room-movers. But with the blues, Leo noticed, you couldn’t go too long without coming back to a slow one that either made you sweetly downhearted, or else reminded you of when you were. After one or two of those, Don’t-Mistreat-Me or All-Alone-Blues, Lars and the others would either go back into the bright smokey kitchen to finish their game,or else stub out their cigars,drain their beers, and call it a night.
 
But the best part of Wednesday nights was right before all that happened, when the parlor was full of people with their eyes on Ryder and Leo’s dad, when Jim Suther’s guitar and wavering alto voice didn’t just match Ryder’s harmonica, but rose above it so that Ryder was huffing to keep up and the more he did that the more Jim seemed to sit back because now it was the number itself that had come alive, the walling woowahing Oh-She-Up-and-Left-Me beauty of it, as if the song was now gentle flesh and blood that Ryder and Jim had no more hold on than moist-eyed smiling Lars or the foot-stomping, hand-clapping rest of them.
 
And while Leo clapped his hands in time, he would sometimes watch those faces that were soft with beer and wonder, even gratitude, in his father’s house. Leo thought about girls and women then and how content they’d be in this room too, how sad it was that there never were any. And children, six or seven of them jumping up and down or curled up under blankets on the floor asleep.