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sleeping sickness down south. He slow, but he ain't dumb."
    Claude considered the exotic idea of sleeping sickness. "I hate to sleep," he said.
    Al wiped his brow with the back of his hand and looked at the boy. "Is that a fact?"
    "She sleeps all the time," Claude said. "I hate it."

    The Blue Book for Beginners
was organized along logical principles that Claude recognized immediately—a series of lessons numbered one through twenty, starting easy and getting harder as you went along. The first night he read it over and over again in his cot, skipping the words he didn't understand as he tried to grasp the overall shape. Sometimes the text went into capital letters, which impressed him. DO NOT SKIP LESSONS. DO THEM IN SEQUENCE. YOU HAVE NOT
FINISHED A LESSON UNTIL YOU HAVE MASTERED ALL OF THE EXERCISES LISTED AT THE END OF THE LESSON. DO NOT SUBSTITUTE YOUR OWN FINGERING FOR THAT INDICATED. The severe, no-nonsense tone of these admonishments thrilled him. They suggested that the author of the book was aware of Claude, able to predict where he might, in his eagerness, go too fast and get sloppy. He trusted the voice and believed that it sprang from a wisdom that he might someday share. There was a kind of intimacy he had not experienced with anything else he'd read. He slept with the book under his pillow.

    Now when he went to the back room after dinner and closed the door, he went with a purpose. Each time he began on page one, playing everything over again, recapitulating the exercises and the scales, faster each time until he reached the place where he had left off. But he never rushed. Even though he knew the early lessons backwards and forwards, could play them without consulting the book, he took pleasure in doing them at a measured pace, concentrating, listening to the sound. When a lesson was completed to his satisfaction, sometimes after many hours, he would not go on immediately to the next, but would create little variations of one kind or another on the lesson he had learned, playing it fast, then slow, loud then soft, or adding notes or phrases that sounded good.
    His hands gave him relatively little trouble, although the indicated fingering sometimes seemed to make things more difficult than they had to be. He followed it religiously nonetheless. Meter was another matter, and halfway through the book he knew he was doing something wrong.
    One night his mother surprised him by coming into the room. "No, no, no," she said. "It's supposed to go dada-dada dum dum." She loomed over his shoulder and raised her thick arm. "Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques," she sang in a clear, beautiful voice, "dormez-vous, dormez-vous." She pointed at the notes. "Dada-dada dum dum. Dada-dada dum dum." Claude was so stunned by the unexpected loveliness of her voice it took him a moment to understand what she was saying. "Dada-dada dum dum," she repeated. "You've got to count. Do you count?"
    "Yes, but sometimes I—"
    "When you count," she interrupted, "go one
and
two
and
three
and
four." She tapped the music with the accents. "One
and
two
and
three. Like that." She turned and left the room.
    When he'd recovered from his surprise he turned to the music and began to count in the way she had suggested. It did make things easier, and he spent the next couple of hours going over old material that he had been playing, correctly, but without really knowing what he was doing. There was always the temptation to follow his ear, but now he was proving what his ear had told him, and he found it exhilarating.

    Later, lying on his cot with the lights out, the music danced in his head. It was almost like listening to the radio, except better, because he could control the sounds—add strings or horns, or take them away. He could listen to two lines at once, put them in harmony, hear things backwards or upside down. He could create simple canons out of phrases from the
Blue Book
and hear them as clearly as if someone were in the room