Skruggs

Skruggs

       By Dougy Hightops

Skruggs, though, sang with a voice beside which the sound of the dulcimer seemed humdrum. Melodious or not, when Skruggs’ wife had been gone only a year he sued my daddy for my hand. The conclusion of the matter was not a foregone one. He visited many times in between gigs in Techumsey, Valentine, Oklahoma City, Laramee, and even one in Mexico across the river from Reo Matte. He brought Jim Beam whiskey usually, if it was a Saturday night, and the two talked about the Andy Warhol paintings my father had inherited from his father, and some of which he himself had collected. When two or three paintings with impressive credentials had been proffered by my suitor and received, and a few dozen bottles of good whiskey drunk, supplied always by Skruggs, my father relented and I joined my husband in his home in Hollywood.

       Home? Mansion, more like. The place had a hundred rooms, it seemed to me. And, a walled garden into which I was not allowed to see, much less venture. Skruggs travelled endlessly and I saw little of him. He had given me a key on our wedding night (with a slyness about the mouth that made me wince). It unlocked a little garden door, the only one that served the garden, an entrance covered in vines and hidden from view. I am a humble woman for the most part. That is what I have been told and what I, too, know of myself if I am any judge of womankind. In this case, however, my patience with another’s requirements ran out.

       Each time Skruggs returned from one of his engagements he embraced me and looked, I noticed, to see if the key still hung about my neck. To find, if it were possible, some evidence that it had been used. Perhaps a scratch on its perfect surface, one designed to easily patina. Never. I did not wish for a long time—for my first ten years—to see the place. Whatever for would I want access to a garden long dead and where, for all I knew, butchered cats and dogs, if not wives, lay buried beyond the watch of neighbors or the arm of the law. My indifference changed the day I heard the melodic notes of a dulcimer from some hidden corner of the Skruggs mansion. I had never explored its length or width and so, in search of this eeriness that began more often to haunt my sleep, I set out on a cold, still night with torch for light to find their source. I had not long to search. None of the rooms housed the sound. The garden, it came to me then! Instantly I felt a surge of childhood curiosity and found myself at the very door I had vowed never to open. In walked I. And, there saw the most astonishing thing.

       In the cradle of a cherry tree, with blossoms about him, sat a young boy dressed in all the colors of the rainbow holding what looked from this distance to be a stringed instrument. The sadness of the music made me expect sadness in his face. When I approached him—cautiously, I must say, for all his smallness of size—I saw at once a remarkable glow about his face, and a beatific peace that dispelled my apprehensions. He laughed when he reached his hand toward me and as I took it in mine. I noticed his fingers flit over its surface. He was stone blind! Such joy in such a void! It goes without saying that I felt the presence of some greater power then, which I had, by accident as it were, discovered. I knew immediately and from that moment for the rest of my days that this hour had been saved for me for this precise time in my life. Never again, in all the sixty-three years that I lived in that house, with Skruggs first gone so much and then finally dead, did I feel that humble loneliness that in my youth I had carried west with me from out of the hills of home.