Late one afternoon in the fall of 1964, at the glorious peak of the foliage season, with the hills surrounding Orleans solid blocks of polished reds, yellows, and oranges, Prof appeared at our door with his sons, Big and Little Prof, in tow. He informed me that he’d borrowed a farm truck from a school board member to “go fetch Hayford a Christly piano”—a nearly new Baldwin in mint condition, advertised for sale in the local paper by a recently retired teacher in nearby Barton. Jim Hayford, the school’s music teacher, was a former student of Robert Frost’s and a fine lyric poet in his own right. I will return to Jim presently. In the meantime our superintendent, having had another two-quart day, had stopped by to recruit me to drive the truck. The boys rode in the back, and Prof sat up front with me, working on quart number three.
The owner of the piano wasn’t at home when we arrived, so we poked around in an old carriage shed, looking at some other items for sale: a sleigh with elegant curved iron runners, some wooden maple-sugaring buckets, a crosscut saw, and another piano, this one lidless, with most of its ivories missing and a Rhode Island Red hen nesting in its innards. When the schoolteacher arrived a short while later, she told us that her husband had bought the beat-up piano in the shed for five dollars when an infamous local roadhouse called the Rum Hound closed its doors in the late 1940s. She invited us into her parlor to inspect the Baldwin, upon which Prof played a one-finger, three-quart bar of “Chopsticks.” Pronouncing the instrument satisfactory, he wrote a personal check to the teacher, and, with Big and Little rolling their eyes, we manhandled the thing out onto the porch and down two planks into the truck. Prof secured it with a frayed hank of baling twine tied off with a knot he claimed to have learned in the navy during “the war”—a lie so monstrous that Big and Little burst out laughing.
Back in Orleans, Prof had an inspiration. Why not slope over to Cliff Street and surprise old Hayford with the piano before carting it to the school? Instantly I thought of a number of very good reasons why not. Cliff Street had not been idly named; it was as steep as any street in San Francisco. Nor was the truck, whose regular brakes were at best questionable, equipped with a working emergency brake. Riding through Orleans, Prof called out to his fishing cronies on the street, whistled at two miniskirted young secretaries on their way home from the mill, waved his empty quart out the window like a frat boy on an initiation rite.
“Slap her in first gear and gun her, Mosher!” Prof roared, heaving the empty onto the village green, where a contingent of public-spirited church ladies were raking up leaves. “To the bold go the laurels!”
I jammed the shaky floor-shift knob into first and we started up Cliff Street. The bank president was out on his lawn burning leaves, the scent evoking a fleeting memory of Chichester and my uncle. Up the hill, Jim and Helen Hayford’s big, yellow, ornately gingerbreaded house came into sight.
We never reached it.
“Stop! We can’t hold the piano back,” the boys yelled from the truck bed. I mashed down on the worn metal brake pedal with every ounce of my weight. Prof piled out of the cab. Unsurprisingly, the baling twine had parted, and even though Big and Little Prof were as rugged as any two grown men in town, they were no match for gravity, and that quarter-ton piano was tilted up on the truck bed at a terrifying pitch. Somehow, with Prof’s help, they lowered it onto the street. Before they could gee-haw it around at right angles to the hill, it got away from them. Down Cliff Street on its sturdy casters rolled the nearly new Baldwin. Down Cliff Street, running nimbly alongside the fugitive instrument, went Prof and his great big boys.
“T I M—B E R!” Prof hollered as the runaway piano hurtled over the riverbank. One of the legs snapped off, then another. The Baldwin flipped onto its lid and kept going. It skidded down the bank and plunged into the rapids where, with a final crescendo, it splintered into kindling.
“I got my piano, Howard,” Jim told me the next morning before school. “But it seems to have undergone a transformation. There’s a nest of some kind inside it.”
I accompanied him downstairs to the music room, where I was amazed to see the battered old roadhouse piano from the former schoolteacher’s carriage shed. Evidently, after dropping me off at my apartment, Prof and his boys had returned to Barton, purchased this old wreck, and, under cover of darkness, brought it to the school. Jim listened gravely as I told him what I guessed had happened.
When I finished, he nodded and tinkled a couple of the remaining upper-register ivories. “I’m reminded,” he said, “of what my great-grandfather said to Mark Twain after hearing him speak in Burlington.”
“Which was?”
“Mr. Clemens, that was the funniest talk I’ve ever heard. It was so funny, it was all I could do to keep from laughing.”