Mountain Solo

by Jeanette Ingold

She had green eyes and shining red hair, and when she smiled, Frederik saw dimples dent in at both sides of her mouth. "I'm Maureen O'Leary," she said, "and I'll like having a new neighbor Will you be going into town to high school?"

  "I don't know," Frederik answered, with no idea what the plans for him were.

  "I'll be starting my freshman year after we come down from the mine," Maureen said. "Maybe we can ride in together some."

  "He's too old for school," Naill O'Leary told her and ended the talk by wheeling his horse around. "You, too, if you get any ideas I don't like. Let's go."

  After they'd left Frederik said, "I see what you mean about them souring things. Why were you even nice to that man?"

  "It's just good business to get along with neighbors," Uncle Joe answered, pausing to tamp tobacco into his pipe. "Besides, I feel sorry for Naill O'Leary. Ever since his wife left him, he's poured his soul into a worthless mine. He's not the first person gone addled over losing a spouse."

  Like my father, though that was different, Frederik thought, as Joe went on, "I've been told his wife ran off years ago, saying she was tired of living with a man who'd never make good."

  "Maureen's mother you mean?"

  "Yes." Uncle Joe looked at Frederik sharply. "And Augie's."

  "And the O'Learys were the reason the Middlers left? Frederik wanted to be sure he had it straight.

  "That's so," Joe answered. Then he laughed and slapped Frederik on the shoulder "Of course, the Middlers didn't have any son to notice a pretty girl with green eyes. If they had, that might have changed things."

  Maureen O'Leary was on Frederik's mind when he awoke in the loft above the one room of Uncle Joe's log house. The March morning was still dark, but even earlier he'd heard Uncle Joe leave to go into the mountains to check his traplines, a two-day job that he did three times a week.

  Now, with all the morning's chores to do alone, Frederik quickly arose and hurried to work. He chopped through creek ice to get water for the livestock. He tossed hay into feeders and fed grain to shoving, pregnant ewes. He split firewood, filled kerosene lamps, and shoveled the lane where new snowdrifts had blocked it.

  He had to rush to be done in time to saddle Patch by six-thirty. Maureen would be coming by soon on her way into Missoula, and Frederik wanted to ride in with her.

  In the half year since Frederik had come to Montana, he hadn't enrolled in high school. Snow and distance made a daily round-trip impossible, and Uncle Joe had looked relieved when Frederik said he guessed he'd be better helping here than spending five days a week in town.

  Lately, though, he'd been riding in with Maureen on Sunday mornings and also returning to town some Friday afternoons to ride back with her. During the school week she stayed with an aunt.

  Frederik had met the aunt. She was a cold-seeming woman who bossed Maureen around while saying she was only teaching what her sister—Maureen's mother—should have. She made attending Sunday Mass a condition of Maureen's staying with her.

  Frederik cinched in his horse's belly strap. "Behave yourself Patch," he said. "Holding your breath won't make me put this saddle away." He tightened the strap another notch. "And you know you like going out."

  The brown-and-white paint horse just snorted.

  ONCE ON THE ROAD, Frederik didn't have to wait long for Maureen. She brought her horse up next to his, and after exchanging greetings they rode quietly side by side.

  Not that Frederik didn't have things he wanted to say. He just didn't know quite how.

  Uncle Joe, when he'd realized how regularly Frederik was making these rides, had teased, "Nephew, fifteen's too young to be falling in love."

  "I'm not," Frederik had answered, his face growing hot. "Keeping Maureen company is just something to do."

  But now, as daylight came and they stopped to watch their warm breath turn into a vapor gauze over ice-crystaled pine boughs, Frederik thought how beautiful she made the winter mornings.

  When Maureen showed him the branches of red twigs outlined by the blinding brightness of a climbing sun, Frederik noticed how the sunlight made a golden glow along the edge of her cheek.

  "You're not listening to a word I'm saying," she accused.

  "I am too."

  And he was, if not to her words about what a pretty pattern the branches made, then to her voice, with all its lilting shades. Like a violin, he thought. Like music.

  Now how he wished he could play the violin the way his father had, because he'd like to play it for Maureen. He'd like to make it say what he didn't have words for on this still winter morning.

  Then the stillness was disturbed by snow shaking from treetops across the creek. There was a shouted order and the sound of movement in the forest.

  Maureen's face turned anxious. "Let's hurry," she said. "That's probably Pa and Augie bringing down a sled of wood, and there's no point in them seeing you riding with me."

  "Would they mind?" Frederik asked.

  "They mind everything."

  Frederik swung his pick and then shoveled out another few inches of irrigation ditch before pausing The July day seemed as hot as the worst of winter had been cold. He wiped away some of the perspiration that streamed down his face and burned his eyes. One more hard job.

  But Frederik had to admit that all the work was bringing results.

  He and his uncle had enough onions, potatoes, turnips, and carrots growing to fill the root cellar come fall. They had twenty calves that fattened up would bring in needed cash. And their meadow had already yielded a good first cutting of hay and might even give a second if the weather held. Putting up enough hay to feed the breeding animals through the winter—that was the key to this country.

  Frederik frowned. The few times he'd ridden by the O'Leary place on the creek, he'd seen little evidence of any work being done there. Probably, he thought, that was because Naill O'Leary and Augie were putting all their efforts into sinking a mine deeper and deeper into a mountainside. To Frederik, it seemed a fool thing to do, to chase after gold and let their homestead go uncared for.

  But at least the mining kept Augie and Naill away a lot, and they didn't always take Maureen. That left her time for Frederik.

  Maybe I could see her today. He and Uncle Joe were going to blow some stumps in the afternoon, but after that he might be free to walk down to the creek, and maybe she'd be waiting there....

  She would laugh when he told her about the evening before, how he'd tried to play his father's violin.

  He was ashamed at how little he remembered. The names of the strings—G, D, A, E—yes, he had those, but he'd had a struggle trying to tune them.

  "Perhaps," his uncle had said, listening to Frederik try to pluck them into some kind of harmony, "it would be better with the bow."

  But a few moments later Uncle Joe had to say, "No, I guess not."

  Yes, it would be a funny story to tell Maureen.

  But it was a story that made Frederik regretful, too. There was something about this place and about her that called for music, and he didn't know how to make it.

  "NEPHEW, ANOTHER hour of solid work," Uncle Joe said in midafternoon, "and then you go see if there are any fish in the creek." The skin around his eyes wrinkled as he teased, "That is why you go down to the creek every chance you get? To look for fish?"

  Absolutely," Frederik answered.

  "But meanwhile, will you keep your mind on what you're doing, so that dynamite we're using doesn't blow us up!"

  They had finished ditch digging for the day and were now clearing some of the upper field that ran along the edge of Joe's property. It would make a good hay field once it was open enough to work with a team, and they already had the irrigation ditch far enough along to get water to it.

  Most of the big timber had been taken out of the field long ago, and this past winter they'd cut down what was left, hauling the tree trunks to a sawmill and burning the slash. Now there were just these stumps to be yanked out or blasted with dynamite, and, of course, countle
ss rocks to be loaded onto a rode sled and dragged to the edge.

  Tree stumps and rocks. Those are two things I'm fast becoming an expert on, Frederik thought. "Ready for me to set the next charge?" he asked.

  "Better hold oft," his uncle answered. He gestured toward a couple of men down on the road. "It looks like we've got visitors. Want to take a break and say hello?"

  THE MEN, a pair of surveyors, were positioning a tripod when Frederik and his uncle got down to them, and one of them explained that they were working on a federal project. "The government wants good surveys of all this land that's not been properly mapped before."

  "About time," Uncle Joe said. "We've got one neighbor we'll be glad to show some official survey markers to."

  The men laughed, and the one who was doing the speaking said, "We never know when we come onto a place if we're going to be welcomed or shot at, and to tell the truth, your dynamite didn't seem all that friendly until we saw what it was."

  "Don't know how we'd settle this country without the stuff," Uncle Joe said. "It's handy."

  "Handy and dangerous," the man said. "But I guess about everything you do out here is risky one way or another."

  "That it is," Joe agreed. "That it is."

  Tessie

  Things changed after the recital. At school that Monday, I found kids huddled around our teacher who was showing them the newspaper with my picture in it. "Our celebrity," she said when I entered the room. "I think we should proclaim this Tessie Thaler Day."

  Suddenly everybody liked me. A girl named Anne said I was going to be the first person she invited to her birthday party, and another girl, Sandra, asked me to be her friend. She said that since she was going to start piano lessons, we ought to be best friends.

  At lunch all the kids wanted to sit by me, and a cafeteria aide picked two and told the rest they'd have to wait for another day.

  "Who will you pick tomorrow?" someone asked, and I wondered myself.

  Except the next day there wasn't quite so much a push to be next to me, and the day after that, everybody wanted to sit next to Brandon Graham, who came to school on crutches from riding his mountain bike no hands, standing up.

  Anne did ask me to her birthday party, but I didn't get to go. She held it on a Thursday afternoon when I was to have a violin lesson, and Mom said a party wasn't a good enough reason to change it.

  Sandra's birthday wasn't long after that. Her party was on a Saturday, so I could have gone, only she didn't invite me.

  I tried not to care, but Dad knew I was disappointed. All that day he did special things with me. We went to a craft store and bought plaster of paris, and then we hiked along a muddy creek bank until we found animal tracks that didn't belong to somebody's dog or cat. "Muskrat," Dad told me.

  He showed me how to stir water into plaster until we had a smooth paste just thin enough to pour into the spraddle-toed tracks, and while we waited for the casts to harden he told me how muskrats build burrows and make underwater entrances.

  Afterward we went to a park where we sat side by side on swings. The sun had dipped behind the hills by then, and although my sweater kept my arms warm, the air felt chilly on my face.

  Dad asked, "Have you got something you want to talk to your old man about?"

  "I guess not."

  "I'm pretty good at listening."

  "I know." My voice sounded little, even to myself.

  We swung back and forth while the night got darker Then I blurted out, "Why am I different?"

  Dad asked, "Do you think you are?"

  "Other kids think so." I told him about Shawn Peterson calling me a musical freak, and how Anne and Sandra told him he was just jealous. Only I didn't tell Dad that I heard them whispering afterward. Sandra said, "She is pretty weird. My mother says it's not natural for a kid to spend all her time doing one thing."

  Dad said, "You haven't told me what you think. Do you believe your violin playing makes you different?"

  "Kind of. I'm glad I'm good at my violin, but I don't understand why I'm especially good. It can't just be because I practice."

  I tried to think how to explain.

  I said, "There's this boy in my class who wants to be a baseball player a real one, like in the major leagues. All he does every recess is practice throwing, and every night his father takes him to a pitching place where he can work for hours. Only there's another kid just in second grade who's already better."

  Dad shook his head. "I don't think anybody understands why some children get one talent and others another or -why an occasional child receives talent in an extraordinary amount."

  "Like me?" I asked.

  "Like you. The best I can tell you is to think of your ability with your violin as an unexplained gift to enjoy and be thankful for."

  "Because it just is?" I asked.

  "Because it just is," he answered.

  I had one more question. "Dad, do you wish I didn't have my gift?"

  He didn't answer directly. He said, "I would never change who you are."

  I didn't like sixth grade, not as long as I was in it.

  That was the year I had a teacher named Ms. Watkins, who all the parents tried to get for their kids because she made students work up to their potential. Ms. Watkins didn't put up with nonsense.

  So Mom got Ms. Watkins for me and then got into an argument with her the very first day of school. Mom said she'd be picking me up at lunchtime twice a week for violin lessons but would get me back not more than a half hour late. She'd scheduled things that way because my violin teacher that year was a university professor who couldn't fit me in any other time.

  "I can't have Tess being tardy on a regular basis," Ms. Watkins said. "I work my pupils hard, and Tess will need to be present if she's not going to get behind."

  "I think I know what Tessie needs," Mom told her.

  "And I know what my students need."

  They took their argument to the principal, who sided with Mom. He told Ms. Watkins that schools must accommodate the requirements of individuals.

  Ms. Watkins didn't say another word about it that I knew of. Sometimes, though, when I returned from one of my violin lessons, she'd hold up her hand to stop whatever work was going on. "Tess, just take your time," she'd say.

  No, I didn't like sixth grade, and I especially didn't like sixth grade reading, which was one hard book after another I got Cs and Ds on my quizzes, and Ms. Watkins thought I wasn't taking time to read carefully. "If you didn't have the potential, that would be one thing," she told me. "But you're gifted. A brilliant, gifted student unable to answer simple comprehension questions? Don't try to pull that with me."

  I wasn't trying to pull anything I wasn't brilliant. I wasn't even like the smart kids who were smart in everything Maybe when I played my violin I was special, but in doing schoolwork I was just average and sometimes not even that.

  And while I usually got my homework right, that was often because Mom helped me.

  Then one evening my parents went out, and I was left on my own to do a whole fill-in-the-blank page about a book I didn't understand. I wrote in answers the best I could, but I knew I was getting it all wrong.

  In school the next morning, which was a Friday, we exchanged papers for grading When the kid who did mine called out "fifty-five," several kids giggled, and I heard Sandra say, "And she thinks she's so great." Tears welled in my eyes, and I couldn't blink them away fast enough to keep others from seeing.

  Ms. Watkins started the class on a new task and then said, "Tess, let's step into the hall a moment."

  Once we were alone, she said, "Tess, you can't continue to focus on only one thing You need to learn to read well, to learn math, and to learn about the world so that you can find your place in it. You need to put as much effort into other areas of your life as you do into your violin."

  She waited for me to answer but I was afraid I would start really crying if I tried to.

  "Do you put your schoolwork first?" she asked. "When you
go home in the afternoon, you ought to do your assignments before anything else—telephone, television, computer violin..."

  When I still didn't say anything, she made a little tsking sound. "Maybe I'll call your mother."

  That Monday morning Dad caught an early plane to Seattle, to take a class that would keep him away for a couple of weeks. Mom drove him to the airport and got back in time to have breakfast with me. Only then, instead of getting her keys again, she told me I was staying home for the day.

  "Why?" I asked.

  "Because I want you to. You can study on your own this morning, and after lunch you can practice your violin."

  "Why?" I asked again.

  "Don't ask why, Tessie," she told me. "Just do it. I've got to go out for a while."

  She kept me home the next day, also, only this time Mom told me what lessons to do. I did math problems that she checked over and then she told me to show her where my class was in our social studies book.

  "What's going on?" I asked. "Is this about Ms. Watkins's phone call?"

  "Tessie, I'm not ready for questions," Mom answered. "I'm just going to do your lessons with you until I can get some things worked out."

  Then we read aloud a chapter about agriculture and Mom told me about a summer she'd once spent on a cousin's Ohio farm.

  BY THURSDAY we had a new routine down, schoolwork in the morning and violin practice most of the afternoon, and Mom still hadn't explained what things she was working out.

  Friday morning, instead of opening my books I folded my hands on top of them. "When am I going back to school?" I asked.

  "Not today. Please open your reading text."

  "Mom, when?"

  I could see she didn't want to answer hut I just waited, and finally she said, "You're not. I can teach you better than Ms. Watkins seems able to, and in less time. That will open up hours for your violin."