The Ragtime Fool Read Online Free PDF

would go down better.”
    Face on her like she spent all day at a funeral. “Now, May, come on. I was only a few minutes late.”
    “Nearly an hour’s not a few minutes. And would it hurt you to come home a little
before
dinner time? Some men come from work, sit in a chair a bit, and tell their wives about what went on at their job that day.”
    Some men’s wives have a drink waiting when their husbands come in through the door, Brun thought. But no point throwing gas on a fire. “Well, okay. I can try.”
    May’s face said she’d believe it when she saw it.
    “I had me a visit at the shop today, three boys from Chicago, great musicians. Yes. They came in special, just to see how I play rag…music the way Scott Joplin taught me.”
    May set down her fork with a deliberateness that set Brun’s nerve endings tingling. “Wonderful. You took off time from work to play that filthy music you’ve wasted your whole life on. You promised you’d give up ragtime, and cigarettes and whiskey too, if I’d marry you. Your promises aren’t worth listening to.”
    Brun slammed a fist on the table. Silverware danced. “When a girl asks a man for a promise at just the right time, he’ll swear off breathing for her. I might’ve had a chance if you’d just stopped with the smokes and the hootch.”
    “Oh, it’s my fault, is it? You made a promise and you broke it, so now it’s my fault for asking you. Brun Campbell, your whole life has been one big broken promise.”
    Any appetite he had left vanished. Yeah, he’d wrecked his life over a broken promise, but not the one she was talking about. The promise that mattered was the one he’d made to Scott Joplin, who’d taken a fifteen-year-old white boy under his wing, and taught him how ragtime should be played. Then Brun had gone forth to spread the gospel according to Joplin, in hotels and restaurants, in tonks and pool halls, in theaters and on steamboats, and the looks on faces as he played told him the people understood Scott Joplin was High Lord of Ragtime, and Brun Campbell was his prophet. But on the first day of April, 1917, Scott Joplin died, and when they laid him to rest, they put ragtime in the ground with him. Jazz became the be-all and end-all, and joints that had welcomed Brun for years started looking the other way, at trumpets, clarinets, and saxophones. The High Lord was dead, and the prophet lost faith. Opened a barber shop, met pretty May Gibson, and yeah, she did seem to have a bit more enthusiasm for churches and preachers than Brun would have preferred, but her old man was a good joe, liked to tell stories and share a bottle with his daughter’s suitor. It looked to be a good life. Trying to make up for the broken promise to his teacher, Brun made some new ones.
    “I gather you have nothing to say.”
    Brun blinked back to the present. He looked around the little kitchen. What had that good life come down to? A wife and three daughters, all of them convinced that one fine day, while they were sitting around on nice white clouds, playing gold harps, their husband and father would be down you-know-where, choking on sulfur and brimstone while Old Scratch played “Maple Leaf Rag” on a battered, out-of-tune piano. Which, of course, grieved the four women no end.
    “No,” he murmured. “I don’t suppose I do.”
    May’s face softened. She pointed toward his plate. “Go ahead, eat up. I made your favorite, pork chops, the old Oklahoma way.”
    He nodded, forced a forkful in and down. “Good. Real good.”
    May put on the smile of a woman trying to convince her child that the cough medicine in the spoon was actually pretty tasty. “Your daughter had an interview for a new job today, and she thinks she’s going to get it. Would you like to hear about it?”
    “Sure. Shoot.” Brun filled his mouth with pork.
    ***
    He washed, she dried. He squeezed out the dishcloth, hung it on the edge of the drainer, looked up at the white plastic clock over the