“All these years I’ve tracked them, the mother Mary and her baby James, and then last night I remembered where I had seen her last and it was enough that I had. When the singer at the concert had thrummed her last wounding chord, I was crying, because the scene came back to me with that sound, that sad, mournful guitar sound. It was at a carnival at the state fair after Dad got work and we had moved to Charleston, but before my grandparents died. I saw her there, playing the guitar on a stage with some other women, guitars and fiddles and banjos, and the music was merry, not sad, merry for dancing, but that one woman, still just a girl, she had a look in her eye that was shiny with the unshed tears of a hundred sad souls. She played a solo while I watched and sang a ballad, and then she thrummed that sad guitar and the whole story was laid before me in a flash, the sadness of it, the sadness of being human in this world. I didn’t know her story, but I knew her story was sad.”
Part III
Mary Queen of Scots
VIII