Part 22 (1/2)

-What do you hear? Ruby said.

Ada heard the sound of wind in the trees, the dry rattle of their late leaves. She said as much.

-Trees, Ruby said contemptuously, as if she had expected just such a foolish answer. Just general trees is all? You've got a long way to go.

She removed her hands and took her seat again and said nothing more on the topic, leaving Ada to conclude that what she meant was that this is a particular world. Until Ada could listen and at the bare minimum tell the sound of poplar from oak at this time of year when it is easiest to do, she had not even started to know the place.

Late that afternoon, despite the warmth, the light fell brittle and blue and announced clearly in its slant that the year was circling toward its close. This was surely one of the last of the warm dry days, and in its honor Ada and Ruby decided to take supper outdoors at the table under the pear tree. They roasted a venison tenderloin that Esco had brought by. Fried a skillet of potatoes and onions, and drizzled bacon drippings over some late lettuce to wilt it. They had brushed the brown leaves from the table and were just setting places for the two of them when Stobrod appeared from out the woods. He carried a tow sack, and he came and took a seat at the table as if he carried an invitation in his coat pocket.

-You say the word, I'll run him off again, Ruby said to Ada.

Ada said, We have plenty.

During the meal Ruby refused to speak, and Stobrod engaged Ada in talk of the war. He wished it would end so he could come down off the mountain but feared that it would drag on and that hard times would bear down upon everyone. Ada heard herself agree, but as she looked about her cove in the blue falling light, hard times seemed far away.

When supper was done, Stobrod took his sack off the ground and drew from it a fiddle and set it across his knees. It was of novel design, for where the scroll would normally be was instead the whittled head of a great serpent curled back against the neck, detailed right down to the scales and the slit pupils of the eyes. It was clear Stobrod was proud as could be of it, and he had a right, for though the fiddle was far from perfect, he had fas.h.i.+oned it himself during the months of living fugitive. His previous instrument had been stolen from him during his trip home, and so, lacking a model, he had shaped the new one from memory of a fiddle's proportions, and it therefore looked like a rare artifact from some primitive period of instrument-making.

He turned it front and back so they could admire its faces, and he told them the story of its creation.

He had spent weeks tramping the ridges to cut spruce and maple and boxwood, and when they were cured he sat for hours on end knifing out fiddle parts. He cut forms and clamps of his own devising.

Boiled the wood of the side pieces soft and shaped them so that when they cooled and dried they set to the forms in smooth curves that would not come unsprung. He carved the tailpiece and bridge and 2004-3-6.

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fingerboard freehand. Boiled down deer hooves for glue. Augured out holes for the tuning pegs, pieced it all together, and let it dry. Then, he set the sound post with aid of a wire, dyed the boxwood fingerboard dark with the juice of poke berries, and sat for hours carving the viper's head curled over against its body. Finally, he stole a little tin of varnish from a man's toolshed in the dark of night and put the finish on it. Then he strung it up and tuned it. Even went out one night and trimmed a horse's tail to hair his bow.

He then looked upon his work and thought, I've almost got my music now, for he had but one job left, the killing of a snake. For some time, he had speculated that putting the tailpiece to a rattlesnake inside the instrument would work a vast improvement on the sound, would give it a sizz and knell like no other. The greater the number of rattles the better, was his thinking on the matter. He described it along the lines of a quest. The musical improvement he was seeking would come as likely from the mystic discipline of getting the rattles as from their actual function within the fiddle.

To that end, he had roamed Cold Mountain. He knew that in the first cool days of autumn the snakes were moving in antic.i.p.ation of winter, looking for dens. He killed a number of fair-sized rattlers, but once he had them dead, their little tails seemed pitifully insufficient. Finally, after climbing high, up where the black balsams grow, he ran upon a great old timber rattler, laid out on a flat slate to sun. It was not enormous in length, for they do not get terribly long, but it was stouter through the body than the fat part of a man's arm. The markings on its back had all run together until it was black as a blacksnake, almost. It had grown a set of rattles as long as Stobrod's index finger. In telling this to Ada he held out the finger and then with the thumbnail of the other hand he marked offa place right at the third knuckle. He said, They was that long. And he snicked the nail repeatedly across the dry skin.

Stobrod had walked up near the stone and said to the snake, Hey, I aim to take them rattles. The big snake had a head like a fist, and it raised it up off the stone and evaluated Stobrod through slitted yellow eyes. It s.h.i.+fted into a part coil, declaring it would rather fight than move. The snake quivered its tail a moment, warming up. Then it went to rattling with a screech so dreadful as to make one's thinking seize up in all its units.

Stobrod took a step back as he was intended by nature to do. But he wanted those rattles. He drew out his pocketknife and cut a forked stick about four feet long and went back to the snake, which had not moved and seemed to relish the prospect of a contest. Stobrod stood about arm's length outside what he judged the striking range to be. The snake perked up, raised its head farther from the ground.

Stobrod urged it to strike.

Whooh! he said, shaking the stick in its face.

The snake rattled on, unfazed.

Waah! Stobrod said, poking at it with the fork. The rattling diminished a bit in volume and pitch as the snake s.h.i.+fted its coils. Then it fell silent, as if from boredom.

The snake clearly required an offering of more substance. Stobrod eased forward, then crouched. He put the knife between his teeth and held the split sapling in his right hand, poised on high. He waved his left hand fast, well within striking distance of the snake. It lunged, parallel to the ground. Its jaws unhinged, fangs down. The pink of its mouth looked big as the palm of an opened hand. It missed.

Stobrod jabbed with the sapling and trapped the head against the rock. Moving fast he set his foot to the back of the snake's head. He grabbed the thras.h.i.+ng tail. Drew his knife from his mouth. Cut the rattles off clean, right at the b.u.t.tons. Jumped back the way a cat will do when startled. The snake writhed, collected itself again into striking stance. It tried to rattle, though it had now but a bleeding stub.

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-Live on if you care to, Stobrod had said, and he walked away shaking the rattles. He believed that from then on, every note he bowed would have a new voice. In it somewhere underneath would be the dire keen of snake warning.

After he had finished telling Ruby and Ada of the fiddle's creation, Stobrod sat and looked at it as if it were a thing of wonder. He took the fiddle up and held it before them as an exhibit, part of a demonstration intended to show that he was now another man in some regards than the one that went off to fight. Something about the war had made him and his music a whole different thing, he claimed.

Ruby remained a skeptic. She said, Before the war you never showed more interest in fiddling than would be required to get a free drink for playing at a dance.

-Some say I now fiddle like a man wild with fever, Stobrod said in his own defense.

The revision in him had come unexpected, he said. It happened near Richmond in the month of January 1862. The army he was with had set up winter quarters. One day a man had come into camp asking for a fiddler and was sent to Stobrod. The man said that his daughter, a girl of fifteen, had, in kindling the morning fire, done as she often did and poured coal oil down onto the fresh kindling.

This morning, though, it had hit live coals and gone off in her face a moment after she had set the stove lid back into its place. The circle of cast iron had been blown with great force into her head, and the beam of fire that had come out of the opening had charred her flesh near to the bone. She was dying. That was certain. But she had come to consciousness after an hour or two, and when asked what might ease her pa.s.sing, she answered that fiddle music would do fine.

Stobrod took up his instrument and followed the man to his house, an hour's walk away. In the bedroom he found the family sitting around the perimeter of the room. The burned girl was propped up on pillows. Her hair was in patches and her face looked like a skinned c.o.o.n. The pillowcase was damp around her head where her raw hide had oozed. There was a deep gash above her ear where the stove lid had struck. The wound had stopped bleeding but had not even turned brown yet. She looked Stobrod up and down and the whites of her eyes were startling against the rawness of her skin. Play me something, she said.

Stobrod sat in a straight chair at the bedside and began tuning. He twiddled so long at the pegs that the girl said, You best get to it if you aim to play me out.

Stobrod took a turn at Peas in the Pot, and then at Sally Ann, and so on through his entire repertoire of six tunes. They were all dance figures, and even Stobrod knew them to be in poor keeping with the occasion, so he did his best to slow them down, but they refused to be somber, no matter how sluggish the tempo. When he was done the girl had not yet died.

-Play me another, she said.

-I don't know no more, Stobrod said.

-That's pitiful, the girl said. What kind of a fiddler are you?

-b.u.m and shoddy, he said.

That brought a quick smile to the girl's face, but the pain of it showed in her eyes and brought the corners of her mouth down quick.

-Make me up a tune then, she said.

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Stobrod marveled at such a strange request. It had never entered his mind to give composition a try.

-I don't believe I could, he said.

-Why not? Have you never tackled it before?

-No.

-Best go to it, she said. Time's short.

He sat thinking for a minute. He plucked the strings and retuned. He set the fiddle to his neck and struck the bow to it and was himself surprised by the sounds that issued. The melody he spun out was slow and halting, and it found its mood mainly through drones and double stops. He could not have put a name to it, but the tune was in the frightening and awful Phrygian mode, and when the girl's mother heard it she burst into tears and ran from her chair out into the hall.