Now, I don’t know what happened when Sutter came home and found that piano gone. But somebody went up to Boy Charles’s house and set it on fire. But he wasn’t in there. He must have seen them coming cause he went down and caught the 3:57 Yellow Dog. He didn’t know they was gonna come down and stop the train. Stopped the train and found Boy Charles in the boxcar with four of them hobos. Must have got mad when they couldn’t find the piano cause they set the boxcar afire and killed everybody. Now, nobody know who done that. Some people say it was Sutter cause it was his piano. Some people say it was Sheriff Carter. Some people say it was Robert Smith and Ed Saunders. But don’t nobody know for sure. It was about two months after that that Ed Saunders fell down his well. Just upped and fell down his well for no reason. People say it was the ghost of them men who burned up in the boxcar that pushed him in his well. They started calling them the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog. Now, that’s how all that got started and that why we say Berniece ain’t gonna sell that piano. Cause her daddy died over it.

BOY WILLIE: All that’s in the past. If my daddy had seen where he could have traded that piano in for some land of his own, it wouldn’t be sitting up here now. He spent his whole life farming on somebody else’s land. I ain’t gonna do that. See, he couldn’t do no better. When he come along he ain’t had nothing he could build on. His daddy ain’t had nothing to give him. The only thing my daddy had to give me was that piano. And he died over giving me that. I ain’t gonna let it sit up there and rot without trying to do something with it. If Berniece can’t see that, then I’m gonna go ahead and sell my half. And you and Wining Boy know I’m right.

DOAKER: Ain’t nobody said nothing about who’s right and who’s wrong. I was just telling the man about the piano. I was telling him why we say Berniece ain’t gonna sell it.

LYMON: Yeah, I can see why you say that now. I told Boy Willie he ought to stay up here with me.

BOY WILLIE: You stay! I’m going back! That’s what I’m gonna do with my life! Why I got to come up here and learn to do something I don’t know how to do when I already know how to farm? You stay up here and make your own way if that’s what you want to do. I’m going back and live my life the way I want to live it.

(WINING BOY gets up and crosses to the piano.)

WINING BOY: Let’s see what we got here. I ain’t played on this thing for a while.

DOAKER: You can stop telling that. You was playing on it the last time you was through here. We couldn’t get you off of it. Go on and play something.