—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 fashioned 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 fingerboard freehand. Boiled down deer hooves for glue. Augered 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 anticipation 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 off a 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 shifted 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 shifted 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 thrashing tail. Drew his knife from his mouth. Cut the rattles off clean, right at the buttons. 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.
—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 passing, 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 coon. 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 ha
d 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?
—Bum 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.
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.
When he was done the girl looked at Stobrod and said, Now that was fine.
—It wasn’t neither, he said modestly.
—Was, the girl said. She turned her face away and her breathing grew wheezy and wet.
The girl’s father came to Stobrod and took him by the elbow and led him down to the kitchen. He sat him at the table and poured Stobrod a cup of milk and went back up the steps. By the time the cup was empty, the man had returned.
—She’s gone, he said. He took a Federal dollar from his pocket and pressed it into Stobrod’s hand. You eased her way some up there, he said.
Stobrod put the dollar in his shirt pocket and left. Time and again during the walk back to camp he stopped and looked at his fiddle as if for the first time. He had never before thought of trying to improve his playing, but now it seemed worthwhile to go at every tune as if all within earshot had been recently set afire.
The music he had made up for the girl was a thing he had played every day since. He never tired of it and, in fact, believed the tune to be so inexhaustible that he could play it every day for the rest of his life, learning something new each time. His fingers had stopped the strings and his arm had drawn the bow in the shape of the tune so many times by now that he no longer thought about the playing. The notes just happened effortlessly. The tune had become a thing unto itself, a habit that served to give order and meaning to a day’s end, as some might pray and others double-check the latch on the door and yet others take a drink when night has fallen.
From that day of the burning on, music came more and more into his mind. The war just didn’t engage him anymore. He became casual in his attendance. And he was little missed. He came to prefer spending as much of his time as he could manage in the dim regions of Richmond’s taverns, rank places that smelled of unwashed bodies, spilled liquor, cheap perfume, and unemptied chamber pots. In truth, he had throughout the war spent as much time as he could afford in such places, but the difference now was that his main interest became the musical niggers that often played for the customers. Many a night Stobrod wandered from place to place until he found a fellow working at a stringed instrument with authority, some genius of the guitar or banjo. Then he’d take out his fiddle and play until dawn, and every time he did, he learned something new.
He first spent his attention on matters of tuning and fingering and phrasing. Then he began listening to the words of the songs the niggers sang, admiring how they chanted out every desire and fear in their lives as clear and proud as could be. And he soon had a growing feeling that he was learning things about himself that had never sifted into his thinking before. One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held more for him than just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument against the notion that things just happen. By now he knew nine hundred fiddle tunes, some hundred of them being his own compositions.
Ruby expressed doubt at the figure, pointing out that his two hands of fingers had always served his entire need for numerals in all other features of life.
—He’s never had enough of anything to have to count past ten, she said.
—Nine hundred tunes, Stobrod said.
—Well, play one, Ruby said.
Stobrod sat and thought a minute, and then he ran his thumb down the strings and twisted a peg and tried them again and twisted other pegs until he had achieved an exotic tuning with the E string run down about three frets so that it matched up with the third note on the A string.
—I’ve never stopped to name this one, he said. But I reckon you could call it Green-Eyed Girl.
When he set the bow to the new fiddle, the tone was startling in its clarity, sharp and pure, and the redundancy in the tuning led to curious and dissonant harmonic effects. The tune was slow and modal, but demanding in its rhythm and of considerable range. More than that, its melody constantly pressed upon you the somber notion that it was a passing thing, here and gone, unfixable. Yearning was its main theme.
Ada and Ruby watched amazed as Stobrod spun out the music. He had apparently, at least for this forlorn piece, forsaken the short choppy bow strokes of all known fiddlers and was long-bowing notes of great sweetness and stridency. It was music the like of which Ruby had never heard. Nor, for that matter, had Ada. His playing was easy as a man drawing breath, yet with utter conviction in its centrality to a life worth claiming.
When Stobrod finished and took the fiddle from under his grey-stubbled chin, there was a long silence in which the voices of peepers down by the creek sounded exceptionally sad and hopeful in the face of the coming winter. He looked at Ruby as if prepared for harsh evaluation. Ada looked at her too, and the expression on Ruby’s face said it would take more than a tale and a fiddle tune to soften her heart toward him. She did not address him but turned to Ada and said, Might queer that this far on in life he’s finally found the only tool he’s ever shown any skill at working. A man so sorry he got his nickname from being beat half to death with a stob after he was caught stealing a ham.
To Ada, though, it seemed akin to miracle that Stobrod, of all people, should offer himself up as proof positive that no matter what a waste one has made of one’s life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial.
bride bed full of blood
Inman wandered the mountains for days, lost and befogged through a stretch of wretched weather. It seemed to rain from about the new moon to the full, though with the sky blanked out who could tell, unless you thought to keep count of days starting when the first drop fell. Inman had not seen sun, moon, or stars for at least a week and would not have been surprised to find that for the entire time he had walked in circles or in geometric figures more complex but equally directionless. To keep his course straight, he tried picking out points directly ahead of him, a certain tree or rock, to make for. He kept on at this until the thought occurred to him that the points he picked might all link up to make a big circle, and there seemed little to recommend walking in big ones to walking in little. So he went blindly through the fog, taking whatever tack he felt at that moment to be west, and tried to make himself content with just motion.
He had used the goatwoman’s medicine until it was gone, and in short order the wounds at his head had become little puckered scars and the place at his neck was a hard silver slash. The pain settled into a distant noise, like living by a river, one that he figured he could listen to indefinitely. But his thoughts had not healed with like speed.
His haversack became empty of food. At first he hunted, but the high balsam woods seemed a
bandoned by game. Then he tried grabbling for crawfish to boil, but found that he worked for hours to catch enough to fill the crown of his hat, and then after eating them he felt he had gained little by it. He stripped the bark off an elm sapling and chewed it and then ate the cap to a ruby-colored bolete as big across as a frying pan. Fifteen minutes later he was again ravenous. He soon fell simply to drinking creek water out of cupped hands and pulling wild cress from stream margins.
He found himself one afternoon crawling on the mossy ground of the creekside, grazing at the water edge like a beast of the wild, his head wet to the ears, the sharp taste of cress in his mouth and no idea whatsoever in his mind. He looked down into a pool and caught sight of his visage looking up at him, wavery and sinister, and he immediately frabbled his fingers in the water to break up the image for he had no desire to look upon himself.
God, if I could sprout wings and fly, he thought. I would be gone from this place, my great wings bearing me up and out, long feathers hissing in the wind. The world would unfurl below me like a bright picture on a scroll of paper and there would be nothing holding me to ground. The watercourses and hills passing under me effortless and simple. And me just rising and rising till I was but a dark speck on the clear sky. Gone on elsewhere. To live among the tree limbs and cliff rocks. Elements of humanity might come now and again like emissaries to draw me back to the society of people. Unsuccessful every time. Fly off to some high ridge and perch, observing the bright light of common day.
He sat up and listened for a while to the talk of the creek on the round stones, the rain in the down leaves. A wet crow descended to a chestnut limb and tried to shake the water out of its feathers and then sat hunched and ill looking. Inman rose erect and went on bipedal, as was his fate, until he struck a little-used track.