The Ragtime Kid Read Free

into his back pocket, where he’d put some twenty dollars’ worth of folded bills that morning. At the sight of the boy’s face, Saunders laughed, then reached behind his vest and came out with a wad of money, which he placed into the boy’s hand. “They’s bad people in cities, young Mr. Piano Man. You don’t want to be helpin’ them to help themselves, you get my drift.”
    “I’d be pretty dumb if I didn’t,” Brun said, though his voice shook considerably. Saunders, still laughing, put out a hand; they shook. The boy pushed his money down as far as it would go into his shirt pocket.
    Brun told me he could never remember what he did the rest of that day, or how he managed to get back home. But he had no trouble recalling the hiding his father gave him. “You worried your mother,” Mr. Campbell shouted, as he swung the thick, black razor strop. “You had both of us worried to death.” Brun did feel a little bad about that, but having met Otis Saunders and learned to play “Maple Leaf Rag,” he would not have taken the day back for the world. That strop his father laid again and again across his bottom seemed to be hitting another boy. It inflamed Brun’s mind a whole lot more than it did his butt.

Chapter Two
    Sedalia, Missouri
June, 1899
    A dull pounding sprang up behind Scott Joplin’s left eye. Why didn’t Saunders write his own damned music, and quit bothering him about the trio section in “Maple Leaf Rag”? “I appreciate you wanting to help, Otis,” Joplin said. “But ‘Maple Leaf’ is done. You know I’ve got a bigger fish to fry right now, but I can’t fry him unless I catch him, and I can’t catch him if I don’t throw him a line.”
    Like he hadn’t said a word. Saunders went right on grinning like a fool. “Yeah, Scott, but just you listen for a minute, okay? Just one little minute. The way you startin’ that trio right now…”
    The hammer in Joplin’s head beat harder. He closed his eyes. That was his way when he was among people and needed to develop a musical idea. Out of sight, out of hearing, out of mind. He lived in a lively boardinghouse, earned his living playing piano at taverns and dance clubs. If he could write music only when he was alone, he’d never write music.
    During the summer, weekday afternoons were quiet in the Maple Leaf Club, a large room up on the second floor at 121 East Main. Joplin had come here today, hoping for some time to himself. Walker Williams, one of the club’s owners, stood behind the bar, talking quietly over mugs of beer with Tom Ireland, a colored newspaperman who played a first-rate clarinet in the Queen City Concert Band. They knew why Joplin was there, so they’d done no more than smile and nod a hello as he and Saunders walked over to the piano and sat side by side on the bench. Joplin sighed. If he didn’t get
The Ragtime Dance
down on paper pretty soon, the whole kit and caboodle might just float right out of his head, gone forever. Music did that. Like a woman who thought her man wasn’t paying her enough mind. He’d lost other half-composed pieces that way; he didn’t want to lose this one.
    Saunders was a magpie, near impossible to shake, thoroughly impossible to shut up. But it wasn’t in Joplin’s nature to just out and tell the man to go away. Instead, eyes closed, ears blocked, he directed his mind toward the passage in
The Ragtime Dance
he’d been working at. Saunders’ words became a hum in the background. The breeze through the open window put a damper on the throb in Joplin’s head. He heard the music. His right hand twitched. Left hand up. Fingers struck ivory and ebony. He corrected the chord, played on for a few seconds, then snatched the pencil off the music rack and wrote down what he’d just played.
    Saunders said something, no more than a blur in Joplin’s ear. If the man said one word, just
one
word, about the “Maple Leaf” trio…
    “Gettin’ company, Scott.” Saunders aimed a