A Minister's Ghost Read Online Free PDF Page A

fact, you’d be off the pavement, onto the shoulder, or flying down a mountain with little hope of stopping until you hit the valley floor.
Anyone who said they’d taken those curves and slopes at more than fifty was lost, himself, to hyperbole.
    By the time I got to Waldrup’s, the rain had abated, though the sky had grown darker.
    The first thing I heard when I opened the door of my truck was a cracking adolescent voice saying, “One hundred and twenty, on two wheels, almost all the way.”
    Three skinny boys were standing around a wrecked Mustang, its hood up. I thought one of them might be Nickel Mathews, the cousin of Melissa, Skidmore’s deputy/secretary. All three of the boys were staring at the engine the way doctors study a patient on an operating table.
    â€œShe’s gonna need a valve job,” one boy said quietly, “but I believe she’ll make it.”
    I walked by them without speaking. The yard occupied three acres, and every inch was covered with something that had once been automotive. The owner, E. P. Waldrup—whose initials did not stand for anything, and whose friends called him Eppie—was asleep in a sagging brown armchair ten feet from the Mustang, next to his “office.” He was decked out in his usual extralarge, grease-stained indigo coveralls. A man of considerable girth, he threatened to break the substantial chair in which he shifted, snoring.
    The office was a shack the size of an outhouse that held a desk, a phone, and seven hundred boxes of paperwork that no one in the universe could make sense of except Eppie himself. Beside him, stretched out between the office and a telephone pole, was a heavy metal clothesline wire hung with a bizarre array of metal car parts. That sculptural conglomeration of refuse was the main reason I knew Eppie Waldrup.
    Long ago this strange, uneducated man had constructed a rare musical instrument, a sort of junk xylophone. He’d strung up twenty-three various car parts on the metal clothesline just to the side of his one-room-shack office. These car parts hanging in the air were a kind of miracle. If he was in the right mood, and sober enough, he would treat the odd guest to a concert on those scraps of
metal. There being no guest odder than I, Skidmore had persuaded him to perform for me several years previously, and I was enraptured. The sound had unearthly beauty. I had come back to record him twice.
    He played with two tire irons and moved, when he played, with a grace that belied his bulk. He was carried on wings of music. Each piece on his line was a perfectly tuned musical note; combined, they made almost two octaves. And he prided himself on his ability to play just about any song requested. I tried to stump him the first time I met him by suggesting he play Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” and he only had to thump out the first three bars or so before I conceded that he was playing the melody line perfectly, if a little slower than the norm.
    â€œYou’ll have to do better than that, college boy,” he’d taunted me. “I got a education in music from my childhood piano teacher, Miss Phelps. Can’t nobody take that away from me.”
    Occupation and accent are not always indications of mental content.
    I had to remember not to be startled by the sound of Eppie’s voice. For reasons no one knew, it had never changed. Despite that he was over forty, past six feet tall, and weighed nearly three hundred pounds, he had a voice like Shirley Temple’s.
    I’d interviewed him twice as a kind of lunatic-fringe/primitive genius, a musical Howard Finster. Both times we’d had a good laugh at what his voice sounded like on tape. He seemed to have a sense of humor about everything in life, his own foibles included. I thought we liked each other in a casual way, and I was hoping he would tell me things that Skidmore might not, under the circumstances.
    I