More wonderful than their presence, more wonderful than their momentary exultation and enduring fame, was the music coming along with them. A tall man with cottony white hair—a stranger—sustained in his hands a fife very much like the one which Merry had found upon that high shelf at home. It spoke with the crying of hawks, high wild lift of an eagle’s shriek. There were two small drums muttering in accompaniment, one larger drum booming at intervals in uninterrupted cannonade; but Merry had eyes and ears only for the fife, for the fierce-eyed man who played it. The tune was ragged, savage. The old man played it over and over, and Merry Kinsman ran before him, looking up and back. He trotted backward most of the time. Once he fell, in a muddy place where the cart path turned; he got up, trotted on, keeping pace ahead of the martial music. The tune began with a slow and ponderous threat in lower registers. You thought of horses, war horses, parading off somewhere, going in cumbrous decision to engage in a battle. The great decisive powerful horses wore trappings of leather and brass; dragoons bestrode them. Solid shot flew but they kept coming. Above the storm, hawks and eagles began to soar. They were over the trees, far over powder smoke, they carried glinting banners in their beaks. They said, Here we are: ferocious, untrammeled . . . the Conestoga wagons rumble in roads beneath . . . muskets are being charged and fired, bayonets find the blood of invaders. But here we are, high and fluting! We have power not possessed by more orchestral flutes, we carry a shot-riddled flag held in many beaks. Our tanned wings are wheeling . . . we are America, embattled America. High, proud, far and high!
Certainly other tunes were played that day; Merry could not remember them. He hummed and whistled and burbled the initial chant, the thing which pierced and tooted ahead of the little throng as they came to display themselves, to be proud with the pride which only soldiers feel, which only men may feel who have risked themselves in a war. The tune had been conceived in such pride and spoke of it. All the way home the boy whistled the tune. He ran into the house whistling it. His mother came, floury as always, cloth tied over her hair, apron dusty. She said, Why, Merry, child. You back so soon? Still he kept trying to rebuild the new tune (which was in fact so old a tune) and imagining that sunburnt drumheads were vibrating alongside him, that the boom of artillery arose.
Child, what are you whistling? What is that song? Her face seemed whitening under smudges of wheat flour.
He cried, They played it at the grove. Uncle Dan Ellis was there and all them old soldiers, and young ones that fit the Mexicans, and— They was an old gentleman with white hair, Ma, and he had a fife thing like—like this.
He ran to find the fife of chocolate-colored wood, to show it to her.
But that tune, child—what is it?
I don’t know. His tough small lips began building the delicious sounds once more.
His mother sat down on a stool and began to cry. Pa used to play that, she said between sobs. I don’t know the name, but it’s mighty old. A martial tune like when he was fighting gainst the redcoats. Pa used to play that.
The boy was haunted throughout the night by weird important melodies, haunted especially by the Tune Which Pa Used To Play. Amid fifing and drum-beats he thought that Indians were running loose, he was being chased by a black bear. In a later dream he shot that same bear with an antique weapon. He had graduated from trundle bed to full-sized cot. . . . He left this cot as a fugitive might have stolen, for fear his mother would not wish him out of bed: she might declare that he should be in bed because it was night, because little boys belonged in bed. He went through darkness until his hand closed upon the favored thing, he took it back into bed with him. Eventually he returned to sleep while lying on the fife, and had another dream approaching nightmare in which his chest was impaled by an Iroquois arrow.
In the morning, since there was no school at this season, he could run errands. First off he was sent to the grocer’s shop with a basket of cookies, bearing a note addressed to Mr. Yunke the proprietor. The Widow Kinsman hoped to trade these cookies for cherries from which to make pies. Mr. Yunke had no cherries left this late in the season; he kept the cookies to sell, on shares, or to serve as credit against some future purchase. He gave Meriwether another note to this effect.
Merry did not deliver it, not immediately. Instead he ran to Uncle Dan Ellis’s butcher shop and found the elderly man in his ice shed. There meat was kept through the summer. In winter time Uncle Dan and his sons and his daughters’ husbands cut ice for future needs, and dragged great chunks of it to the village on an ox-sled. It always smelled cool in the shed. Ice was covered with sawdust, and sometimes in summer Uncle Dan could be persuaded to sell chunks. People made cold drinks; root beer was the favorite.
Uncle Dan was trimming a leg of lamb, his knobby scarred hands directing the sharp knife keenly, surely.
Uncle Dan. Who was that old man? That old soldier?
What say, bubby?
He played that thing yesterday. At the rally, before all them gentlemen started to make speeches. He played the fife—
Oh. Name is Parker. Mr. Abijah Parker. Dwells over to Crow Corners.
Crow Corners was a weary way: six miles. Merry Kinsman went there on that same day. He carried his grandfather’s fife. He walked through dust all the way to Church Hollow, then a farmer came along with a team and gave him a ride. At Crow Corners he inquired shyly for the tall cotton-haired Mr. Parker, and was directed to a barnlike structure behind an apple orchard where Abijah Parker pursued his trade of wheelwright. Merry Kinsman could hear ringing tools before he reached the place. Mr. Parker was working alone, pounding a rim upon a hub.
...The tune, he said, was called Jefferson and Liberty. Oh yes, twas old; it went all the way back to the Revolution. That was not the war in which Abijah Parker served, but his own father had been a soldier under General John Sullivan. Oh yes, young boy, it was a mighty old tune. And some there were who called it Paul Revere’s Ride, but Mr. Parker and his fellow musicians had always called it Jefferson and Liberty. And some there were who called it the Gobby O, he didn’t quite know why. He said that sometimes musicians referred to their fifes as gob-sticks; again, he didn’t know why.
He told Merry Kinsman about the Saranac. Planking had been taken up from a bridge, there were just runners of the bridge, and British tried to cross on those runners. They were brave, young boy! They were brave, they kept a-coming. Mr. Parker believed that some officer should have stopped them but maybe their officers were killed by the first volley. And us Americans behind ramparts on the other side—we made up our minds not to let them British get across, so they never even got to the middle of the bridge. They kept running on them three lines of stringers. They were soldiers, they obeyed, they just kept a-coming. And there wasn’t nobody left to give an order to halt. Twas sickening work, young boy. Sickening! Folks talk about the bloody Saranac, and that was the reason: all them bodies gushing out their blood, fast as they fell into that water, turning the stream to red. Twas sad, because war is sad business.
Sun came through apple leaves and lay kindly on the hair of the old man, the gold hair of the child.
Mr. Abijah Parker did not offer to resume his labor with the wheel hub. He and Merry Kinsman sat upon the step beside other leaning wheels against the wall of the building . . . wheels like those had carried wagons forward, had borne supplies, had lugged people into wilderness . . . larger thicker wheels supported the cannon. . . .
His own fife was put away, doubtless on a shelf or in a bureau in the neat brown house beyond; but Mr. Parker held Aaron Briggs’s fife. His firm tapering knowledgeable fingers pressed tightly over six holes and rose and rippled as tunes rippled and rolled. This one, he said; we played it. Funny . . . you said your Grandpa was a fifer too, and this here cocoa-wood was his; but I reckon we never met, though I’ve met many a good fifer in my time, and drummers too. This is the old Eighteen-twelve Stop March. We played it frequent.
His
beardless lips caressed the hole into which he must blow. There came a great wisdom thus early to the boy beside him. Merry could see clearly things which he had never seen and might never see. He could have an understanding of matters which factually he might never understand or even witness. But it was as if he held familiarity with them now. . . . You thought not only of guns: you thought of implements, you thought of cauldrons in which maple sap boiled, you thought of late winter woodlands where sap froze to an icicle at the tip of every spout hammered into a maple tree.
This one, he said. We played it. Tis called Charley Over the Water, and maybe was made up about the Bonnie Prince himself. I’ve heard tell my mother came from Scotland. . . . You thought of bagpipes. You had never seen bagpipes, did not know how they were shaped; nor did you know a claymore, but you saw the blade flashing, and heard young men rushing through heather, and you did not know what heather was, nor how purple it bloomed in August.
This one, said Abijah Parker, is the Cuckoo’s Nest. . . . That one I played just then? Tis named the Jaybird. And so you thought of birds again: the gentle bird who’d fifed low-toned for you in first awareness, high on the elm. And hawks once more. All were American birds, flying high.
Another Stop March. Now, notice how I watch my stops. The Old Seventy-six, and I reckon folks played it in the Revolution, when they was fighting Hessians not far away from here. . . . Here’s another six-eight, he said. They name it Tattered Jack.
He tried to show Meriwether Kinsman how to spread his fingers among the holes; but Merry’s hand was so tiny that his fingers would not reach. This way, Mr. Parker said. Now you take your left hand—so. You put it out in front, put the thumb at the back to help hold. The three middle fingers on the first three holes—so. Now your right hand: it goes down here, and with the thumb to hold the fife likewise. Three middle fingers, bottom three holes. All closed tight for the first note. When you want to take a high octave, you hold up this highest finger. Makes the tone clearer so. Otherwise it’s kind of graty.
This one, he said. Two-four, of course. We called it Gilderoy. Reckon it’s about a kind of fable. . . . And this, he said. Two-four as well. We called it Adam Bell’s March, and it goes clear back. Now this, said Abijah Parker, and his fingers were limber—you would not have known that they were elderly fingers, that joints were stiffening as joints of the agèd must. They were so fluid, notes which sped were fluid and oily. . . . Called that one the Turkey Gobbler. So you thought of turkeys running wild, their burnished necks metallic in the woods, spurred feet fleeing. You heard the rifle sound: a man in buckskin clothes had shot a turkey, shot him dead. . . . Haste To The Wedding, said old Mr. Parker. You thought of a frontier wedding, people dancing as fiddles whined.
Abijah Parker’s bent little wife came out on the cottage stoop and cried, Hoo-hoo. That, he said, was the signal for dinner. Mother doesn’t know we’ve got company to set down with us, he told Merry Kinsman. But she’ll have plenty to eat. Always does. I always did like to set a good table, and somehow managed to do so. He took Merry by the hand and led him to wash at a bench beside the well. Soon the three of them sat at table in the narrow kitchen with its crooked floor, and a bright new step-stove gleaming hotly, squarely in front of the wide fireplace. Mrs. Parker said in a hushed mousy voice, Little boy, and she bowed her head, and then she lifted her eyes again and said, Father, warningly. Old Abijah bowed his head, and Merry bowed his; but he kept stealing glances at this great man. He could not refrain from watching. Abijah Parker had his eyes squeezed shut, his brows were tufted, icy, his forehead cragged. For what we are about to receive, the old man muttered, hold us to be thankful, dear Lord, and love and keep us all. Amen. There were tiny new potatoes boiled in pink jackets; creamed peas, a great bowl of lettuce, a jar crammed with thin young onions, green tops spreading to form a bouquet . . . slice after slice of pungent ham, sliced thinly, with a sugary crust to it; a platter of eggs basted until their tops were white, freckled with pepper. There was berry pie, a big yellow pitcher of milk, pickles and jellies such as Merry had never tasted before. He would dream of them often. In fact he would sit at that table again and again, until the day of hushed voices, the day when, grown a mite taller but still skinny, he would be conducted into the front parlor to see a black coffin placed across chairs. . . .
They said that it was a weary way for young feet to travel. Best to wait by the gate until a neighbor came. The first who passed were only farmers headed for a mile or two beyond, and they drove slow oxen. But soon appeared a swirl of hot dust, with the dappled neck of a big gelding reaching up out of dust, bright wheels flashing, sun flashing on spokes. It was Squire Hart, no less, and he was going all the way to Merry Kinsman’s village. So Merry was hoisted up beside the fat squire, who talked unceasingly of things of which the boy had no comprehension. He remembered later that litigation was a favorite word of Squire Hart’s. All he could do was to sit in blissful daze, listening to those remembered bright notes rolling through the orchard . . . imagined columns of rough soldiers tramping. The Jaybird . . . Adam Bell’s March, Tattered Jack; above all, Jefferson and Liberty. He heard them, he heard them when he was set down at the Widow Kinsman’s gate; he heard tunes crying above and beyond his own lament as the willow switch struck sharply against his little legs and bottom; heard glorious music after he was put to bed without any supper. But he had his fife. He held Grandpa’s fife gripped in damp hands . . . useless fife. His infant fingers could not spread to cover the holes.
...Joe Jew came by. As always that was an event of first importance. Merry’s mother was removing cakes with her long-handled paddle, she was out at her oven which abutted on the roofed back porch. The boy ran to carry good news.
Ma! Ma, it’s Joe Jew! He’s stopping at the gate.
Everyone in the region knew this peddler; he had traveled those roads for years. His ill-tempered brown pony, his jolting wagon with oilcloth top and sides: this vehicle was a peripatetic treasure house. No wonder children clustered hopefully at the tailboard in every village. Sometimes Joe Jew was in a generous mood, he passed out sugarplums; sometimes he was grumpy, he pretended not to see the children. His name was Joseph Iscowitz, and people knew him all the way up to Binghamton and over to Elmira in York State. Twice a year the Widow Kinsman stocked up on spices, flavorings and fruit color; necessarily she bought things like these from Joe Jew because of the paucity of such stock for sale locally. . . . Wonderful cases, all secured by straps, hanging in the wagon; and any one of them could be carried by its strap over the little man’s shoulder as he made his hunched way to the front door.
First off he fetched his case of spices and candies. Mrs. Kinsman selected for her needs, and brought the ginger jar in which she kept her change.
But I want you should see my threads. Such a beautiful new stock I got, Mrs. Kinsman! . . . He could call her by name: that was a trick of his trade; Joe Jew had the names of thousands of customers salted within his curly head. He could say, Well, well, and look at little Hannah. My, how she is growing!
Smart time I have for fancy sewing, said the widow. I can scarcely catch an hour to do the mending for Merry and me.
Joe Jew insisted, he gave Merry a somewhat crushed caramel to show that his heart was in the right place. He fetched the case containing needles, scissors, yarn and such trifles. As always, the child was fascinated by rich colors, delightful purples and crimsons and tans of tinted thread. Still a packet of pins was all that the widow felt that she should afford. She looked wistfully at other items, but shook her head with discipline.
As Joe Jew was closing the case and sighing—as he always did, no matter how much people bought—there was a light thud. Some shiny black object rolled on the old carpet.
Wrong case, said Joe Jew. Now how did that get in here? He picked up the thing.
Instantly Merry Kinsman’s eyes were alight. Oh, please— Oh, Mr. Joe Jew. It’s a kind of fife!
No fife
, said the peddler. No, little boy, they call this a penny whistle. But the price is a dime.
A tin whistle . . . actually it was not composed of tin: it was made of some heavier metal, perhaps lead. Probably made in the same mould with hundreds of others. . . . Ma! cried Meriwether Kinsman, dancing as he waved the thing in his hand.
You’ve got along thus far without a whistle, Merry. Guess you can get along still.
But, Ma, look. It’s just like a fife, cept—see—you blow in the end. It’s got six holes, like a fife. Look, Ma, they’re real close together! I can reach them with my fingers. I can’t reach the holes on Grandpa’s fife until I get growed.
The little boy, he loves the whistle, said Joe Jew, wheedling. It would be nice were you to buy it for him?
Can’t afford it.
Oh, Ma!
Can’t afford it, said the widow sternly. She ushered Joe Jew out of the house and went back to her oven. Merry collapsed on the step in tears.
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