Neck Reset

A woman brings her father's guitar in ten minutes before closing and says it just needs strings. The action stands an inch off the board at the twelfth fret. The neck is straight, the straightedge lands right on the bridge, which is the textbook pass. The second test, which measures the string against the wood, comes back under three-eighths.

Both are true, because somebody took the bridge down flat to make the first one lie. The honest answer is nine hours. She has six hundred dollars. Then he opens the job book and finds a ticket older than his own hand with a number that cannot fit the work.

Eleven of a rental fleet's instruments have come back since the first of January: split tops, a bridge loose in a case, fret ends sharp enough to cut a hand. It is February in a county of eleven thousand people, and any repairman handed that list says the same word. Dry.

He says it nine days and is right about eight of them. Then drugstore photographs along the bench show three interiors with nothing wrong with the wood — three glue lines that let go and left sound board on both sides, which is not what dry does. Thirteen hours of work, one bench, one glue pot, and a date on the twentieth.

He has played the Saturday night at the Upper Fork fire hall since nineteen ninety-six and has missed four, and can name all four. There is no microphone out there. One Saturday the caller asked him to run a tune back through, because he could not hear the low end from where he stands, and he had never asked before.

It is the second week of May, when every board in the county takes on water, and three instruments are already on the shelf with that complaint and nothing wrong with them. This one has a bridge somebody cut in a hurry, sitting on the outside edges of both feet. Weldon Trivett quotes three hours and cuts a new one while the man watches. It is easier under the hand all the way up, and it has not done one thing about the bottom.

August, and a man comes in with a banjo in a black case with the corners gone through, no paper with it and nothing to say about it except that his grandmother had it before his father was born. The fifth peg will not stay. What he wants is for her to be right before October, because a group of players asked him to go over there with them and it is the only time anybody is going to ask.

The peg turns out to be the hole and not the peg. The head comes up, the bridge goes back where it belongs, and the action comes down on its own. Then Weldon Trivett lays a finger on the nut, pushes sideways, and the nut moves.

It has to come off before it can go back on, and that is one hour and the most common job in the trade. The bottom of the slot under it is flat, square in its corners, with a track down the middle where something spun, and nobody cut a slot that way in nineteen twenty-four. And the nut is ivory.

November, and the second wave is in: the cracked tops came in October and what is left is people getting around to the thing they noticed a month ago. A man carries a black case against his hip with both hands under it, sets it on the counter, opens it, and stands back from it. It is his mother's, off a stand in a front room on the north side of a house, where it has stood his whole life. Two things, he says. It won't stay in tune and there's a split in the front of it.

The split is a finger and a half, it went with the grain, and it shuts when Weldon Trivett puts a thumb either side. The tuning is the bridge: one foot down, one standing on the front edge of itself, and a strip of paper goes under the treble foot and keeps going. That is a two-hour bridge and a one-hour crack. The crack is why his arm has to go inside the instrument, and the inside of a mandolin is a place nobody has ever seen.