Story With No End

In the summer of 1986, I flew from Fairbanks to Seattle to purchase a mandolin. I parked my one-year-old son on a wooden chair in the middle of the music shop, safely out of reach of the guitars, violins, and banjos hanging from the walls while I examined a flat iron mandolin hand-made in Bozeman, Montana. Flat, round body, mother-of-pearl inlays, twelve strings stretched tight as tendons. As I examined the mandolin, my son managed to work his left leg between the posts on the back of the chair, wedging it in tight as a cork in a bottle. The shop rang with his indignant screams while the owner delicately sawed apart his fine oak chair.

Naturally, I bought that mandolin. Over time, I taught myself to play, singing my children to sleep with ballads about train wrecks and gallows poles and unrelentless, unrequited love. Until one night, after kissing their smooth faces, and backing quietly out of the room, I stepped on my mandolin, cracking the body clean as a walnut shell, the bridge collapsing under my clumsy weight.

The next night, to my surprise, they asked me to sing anyhow. Sing the one about the conductor trying to make lost time, they begged. Or the one about the daughter found hanging from a rope. Or sing the one about the true love who brings silver and gold, or the mocking bird song, or the riddle about how much you love us, the story that has no end.