by S. M. Hulse
“Should we say something?”
Wes walked to the edge of the ridge, felt a clump of damp soil give way under his feet. “Can if you want to.”
But neither of them did. Didn’t move, either, and they stood together for a long moment, Wes noticing Dennis’s eyes getting a sheen to them. His own eyes were dry, but his heart beat hard in his chest, drumming against his breastbone in irregular bursts of impossible speed. Normal, he reminded himself. Normal for the permanent absence of a person to derail his heart from its rhythm, as though his grief were trying to kill him, send him wherever his wife had gone. He thought he was ready for this. Ready for her to be gone. He’d known Claire wasn’t going to get better. Known it for a long, long time, hard as he’d tried to deny it. He’d already gone through all the anxiety, the anger, the shit the folks with the hospice were always wanting to talk about. Anticipatory grief, they called it. Hell of a name. Like he was looking forward to her death. The least he should’ve gotten for going through that was an easier time when the time came—and Wes had been foolish enough to think he’d earned that much, earned a reprieve from the shock, at least, from the sharpest edge of new grief—but now the time had come and Claire was gone, and it was not easy, and he felt it all.
Beside him, Dennis unfolded the top of the plastic bag. Wes didn’t look, didn’t want to know that whatever was left of his wife now looked like kitty litter or playground sand or whatever hideously mundane thing human ashes might resemble. “You do it,” Wes said.
His stepson took a handful of ashes, and one of the horses sighed, and Dennis opened his hand.
What was left of her caught the wind and eddied out over the valley.
PART II
GRACE
Dear Lord, he says.
She finds herself wanting to believe it didn’t start to fall apart until after the riot. That would make it simpler. That would make it Bobby Williams’s fault, and it would be so easy to lay it all at his feet. But Claire has always been cursed with honesty, and she cannot forget that it started long before.
What she wants is baseball. Dennis is four when they come to Black River—old enough to realize his own fatherlessness—and Claire wants a man who will buy her son a glove, who will teach him to catch and throw and hit, who can pass on all the arcane rules and rites, the etiquette, the folklore. (Shane played shortstop. Claire spent a season’s worth of afternoons cheering from the bleachers, his letter jacket draped over her shoulders. But she tries not to remember that.)
As it turns out, Wesley doesn’t like baseball, and neither does Dennis. Claire adapts. Hunting, she thinks. That’s something fathers and sons do. Stalk an animal together, kill it, eat it. A little more primal than she might’ve hoped for, but it’ll do. But Wesley doesn’t hunt, though the trophy mount of an eight-point buck in the back of the hall closet proves he knows how. Dull, he tells her. A waste of time. Claire thinks he doesn’t like the killing. The blood. Maybe that’s mere hope.
What Wesley does have to offer is the ritual of afternoons.
He comes home from the prison still dressed in his blue uniform, his boots polished to a high shine (though the sergeants, he’s told her, don’t really care). The creases in his shirt and slacks could be sharper, but he irons his uniforms himself. Doesn’t like her to touch them. He keeps them separate from the other clothes in their closet, empty inches of space between fabrics. When he comes through the door, Claire doesn’t try to talk to him until he’s showered, shaved, changed. He comes out of the bathroom with his hair still dripping and his cuffs unbuttoned and rolled up two turns each, to just above the knobs of his wrists. Then she can ask, How was work? And he will say, It’s over.
He looks at her for a moment after he says it, apology for not saying more, plea for her not to ask. And she never does, because this is when he takes his fiddle down from the mantel. Dennis puts down his crayons and watches, and Claire sits beside him. Dennis will let her touch him at this moment—he squirms away from her hand at other times—and she is always struck by the coolness of his skin, tries to send him warmth from her own body.
Wesley takes his bow out of the case first, tightens the hair. Sometimes he rosins it, more often he doesn’t. Then he lifts the fiddle to his collarbone, settles his jaw over it. When he tunes, Claire has noticed, the D string gives him the most trouble. He warms up with scales and arpeggios, but they don’t sound like exercises or drills; they sound like music. He knows how to lean on a note, make it just a bit fuller than the brother notes that come before and after, to coax sound into song. Then it’s straight into whatever tunes he’s been playing with Lane and Arthur. Sometimes Claire doesn’t recognize the melodies, but more often she does. He plays some tunes more than others: she rarely hears “Whiskey Before Breakfast” or “Red-Haired Boy,” so she has to listen a few seconds to know what she’s hearing; they’re near strangers. Others—“Lost Girl” and “Blackberry Blossom” and “Hell Among the Yearlings”—he plays almost every day, and Claire knows them even before he’s finished drawing the first note; they are familiar guests in her home.
Then, when Wesley has practiced to his satisfaction (he is so rigid in this, work before play, the band’s tunes before anything else, though she doubts her husband considers anything he does with his fiddle to be work): a hymn. These are for her. She’s Claire the heathen, Claire the agnostic, and she loves hymns. Her favorite is “Blest Be the Tie That Binds.” She thinks Wesley’s must be “Nearer My God to Thee,” because he plays it almost as often, though she’s never asked him to.
When he’s pulled the last note from the hymn, Claire goes to the kitchen and slices vegetables, boils water, puts glass casserole dishes in the oven. She listens while Wesley plays Dennis’s favorite tunes: “Flop-Eared Mule” and “Angelina Baker” and “Spotted Pony.” She feels the thumps through the hardwood floor as her son spins and whirls around the living room, but she pointedly doesn’t watch, afraid she’ll see him crash into the furniture or send something shattering to the floor. (He never does.) Sometimes she hears Dennis’s voice—it’s thin and high and goes right to her heart—as he asks a question. How do you make it sound like that, he wants to know, or, Why do you move the bow that way? Wesley’s voice is always too low for Claire to make out, but then he will demonstrate, a slow scale first on single strings and then with drones, or a slide, one shuffle and then another. From the kitchen, it sounds as though he answers her son with song.
After the casserole has come out of the oven and the bread has been put in, after the vegetables have been drained and the jam transferred from jar to dish, Claire sets the table. She sends Dennis to wash up, and Wesley plays “Black River.” She waits by the table and listens. Sometimes she can hear how he has changed it from the day before, and sometimes she can’t. Always it sounds different from all his other tunes. He is a gifted musician no matter what he plays, but he is a master of this one piece.
Beautiful, she tells him, when he’s done.
He lowers the fiddle, loosens the bow hair. Better, he allows.
Wesley puts his fiddle away, and Dennis comes back from the bathroom, and Claire brings the food from the kitchen. Then they sit down to dinner and Wesley says grace.
Bless this family as we share in Your bounty.
When they are first married, Claire closes her eyes for grace. Her family never prayed, so she studies her husband and does as he does: eyes closed, head bowed, fingers intertwined. Though Claire does not believe in God, she loves her husband’s efforts at faith. He keeps a Bible on their bedside table and reads from it most nights before turning out the light; he told her once, while they were lying beside each other in the dark, that the stories in its pages never seem quite the way he remembers them from church.
One Friday when Dennis is six, Wesley gets up with the sun and drives to Elk Fork. When he comes back, it is with a fiddle small as a toy. Dennis is delighted—so delighted Wesley has to hold the tiny fiddle on his lap until Dennis stops bouncing around th
e living room and can be trusted not to break his new acquisition. The sounds he produces are truly blood-curdling. He wraps one hand around the fiddle’s neck, another over the bow, and he pulls the horsehair indiscriminately over the strings—on the wrong side of the bridge, or halfway up the fingerboard—beaming as the instrument shrieks.
Wesley grins at her, and it’s the rarest of grins, wide enough she can see the glint of a silver molar, true enough his eyes brighten with it. He squats down beside Dennis and guides his arm into position, loosens his grip on the neck. Dennis doesn’t shrink from his touch, leans toward him when he speaks. He shows Dennis how to hold the bow, folding his own hand into a rabbit shape, bouncing it across the space between them. Dennis happily follows suit. Remember, Wesley tells him, wrapping his fingers around the bit of ebony at the end of the bow, the rabbit holds the frog. He puts his hand gently over Dennis’s and draws the bow smoothly over the string, a small but clear sound filling the room.
By the time he is ten, Dennis knows dozens of tunes by heart, but he is not a musician. This is clear even to Claire. It isn’t that he’s bad—he plays more or less in tune, and produces a decent tone—but he can only mimic, and there’s a mechanical quality to his playing. It is as though her son is a wind-up toy that plays a tune whenever fiddle and bow are placed in his hands.
Wesley doesn’t seem to mind. He sits knee-to-knee with Dennis in the afternoons and practices with what must seem to be an almost painful deliberateness. A single tune, repeated and repeated and repeated. Wesley plays harmony, mirrors the melody above or below Dennis, taps his foot when her son loses the rhythm, crosses his bow over the strings lightly to let Dennis’s hesitant playing come to the fore.
And yet. They never talk during practice anymore. They used to. Perhaps, Claire thinks, Dennis has reached a level of such proficiency that they are able to communicate with music rather than words. Perhaps there is something in those notes, those pauses, that she cannot hear or understand, a hidden language known to her husband and son from which she is excluded. Perhaps there is more to it than she can see. (This is what she sees: tune after tune after tune, and then an abrupt end to it at five o’clock sharp, Dennis shutting his fiddle in its case, Wesley retuning and continuing with his own practice.)
I know he isn’t as good as you, Claire says one evening. They are outside on the steps; Dennis is at the fence, watching Arthur’s horses graze.
That ain’t important, Wesley tells her.
I’m sure it’s a little disappointing to you.
It’s front-porch music, he says. You don’t got to be a prodigy to enjoy it.
I know he does, Claire says. Enjoy it, I mean.
Wesley takes her hand but doesn’t say anything.
One day—it is a Tuesday—Wesley comes home and changes out of his uniform and gets his fiddle, and Dennis does not come. He isn’t in his room, or the yard. Arthur has been letting him groom the horses after school; Claire calls his house, but no one answers.
I’m sure he’ll be along, she says.
Wesley gives her one of those looks, a little too sharp. It’s gone in an instant, hidden again—a slip, an expression he didn’t mean to bring home with him—but she’s already seen it.
He plays alone, and though Claire listens carefully, she can hear nothing different in his music today. He doesn’t stop playing when Dennis comes in the door at half past four, doesn’t quit until she has placed the last dish on the table and called him to dinner. He says the same grace he says every night, and she waits through the whole meal for him to say something to Dennis about the broken ritual, for Dennis to offer excuse or apology. She waits.
Shield us from those who would tempt or harm us.
When he is twelve, Dennis comes to her and asks about Shane. It’s not the kind of asking that can be deflected, or answered with omissions. Claire has thought of crafting a gentler story—a loving father-to-be, a tragic accident before Dennis was born—but too many people know the truth for it to remain a secret forever, and already Claire knows her son will never learn to see the loving intent behind a revealed lie. And he knows even before he asks—not details, not facts, but he knows there is something she doesn’t want to tell, something he doesn’t truly want to hear. (How does he know? No one said anything; Claire is sure of it. Instead, it’s in the way they treated him, the way they looked at him, or didn’t. Wesley, maybe. Madeline, certainly. And her? Surely not her.) Wesley, she thinks, would never ask a question he didn’t want an answer to. But Dennis is different.
She says, Your father was not a good person.
She says, I didn’t want to . . . be with him, but he forced me. Do you understand what I’m telling you?
She says, But I love you.
Again: I love you.
When she thinks about the conversation in the years that follow, she will remember Dennis listening in silence. But she can’t swear to the memory. Her own words so fill the space in the room, in her mind—they are so clear and sharp-edged—that everything else fades.
Years pass before Claire starts opening her eyes during grace. She sees then that Dennis doesn’t close his eyes, either, doesn’t fold his hands. Did he do those things as a younger child, or has he always waited like this? He is watching her, and Claire immediately feels that she has been caught in an embarrassing act. She looks away, to Wesley. Beneath the fragile skin of his eyelids his eyes jerk back and forth, as though he reads the words as he speaks them. Even in the midst of prayer he seems too alert, too cautious, as though a single slip will bring ruin.
To be clear: she doesn’t believe in God. The devil is another matter entirely.
Let us rejoice in Your gifts of sound and song.
Before Wesley comes home from the hospital after the riot, Claire puts his fiddle away. Nestles it in its red velvet, pulls the lid of the case shut, closes the brass clasps. She puts the case in the closet and leaves it there for an hour, then takes it out again and puts it back above the hearth, lid open, light pooling on the fiddle’s worn varnish. When Wesley comes home he looks straight at it, and she doesn’t know if she was right to move it or right to put it back.
For months afterward Wesley doesn’t touch his fiddle. Even after the splints and bandages come off, he leaves it to gather dust on the mantel. No new routine replaces the old. He comes home and changes out of his uniform, and then he sits on the couch and watches television, or comes to the kitchen and stands uneasily beside the counter and listens to her talk while she cooks. Sometimes he leaves the house and is gone for hours. Every afternoon is different.
And then one day he goes to his chair beside the hearth and takes his fiddle out of its case. He winces when he tightens the screw on the bow, and he takes a long time to tune, tweaks the pegs and fine tuners even after the fiddle sounds good to Claire. He looks up, sees her in the doorway.
Goes out when it’s left like this, he says, and she nods.
He crosses his bow over the strings, nudges one of the pegs again. Again. Claire goes to the kitchen to give him privacy, and there she stands beside the range with her hands on the edge of the counter and the refrigerator buzzing in her ear and she begs his God not to take this from him.
She has never heard him play slowly, Claire realizes. He always plays at speed, and she has wondered if he ever had to play slowly, even as a child, or if all his music was always inside him, waiting to be called. But now he begins to play so slowly she has to listen for several long seconds before she recognizes the familiar melody of “Over the Waterfall.” (She is both sorry and grateful he doesn’t begin with “Black River.”) He hits the first wrong note just a few bars into the A part, a sharp that shouldn’t be there. Another a couple notes later, this one flat. He’s out of practice, Claire tells herself. Rusty is all.
Still. “Over the Waterfall” is a simple tune. One of the first he taught Dennis. It has always surprised her that he likes it so much, because it cannot possibly challenge him. It reminds her that what Wesley likes m
ost is the music. He has so much talent, so much skill, that she sometimes falls into the trap of thinking it’s all about the virtuosity. But he, too, can like a melody simply because the notes sound good together.
Another wrong note. He’s stiff, then. Nine broken fingers, after all, two surgeries. He’s gone to his physical therapy appointments religiously, but the fiddle is different. It will take time. Then he gets to the B part, the faster half of the tune. When he plays this in public, this is where people quit chatting with each other and set back and really listen, where they start whooping and stamping their feet. One missed note. Two, three. His bow slips and squeals against a string.
When Claire goes to the doorway, she finds Dennis in the hall. He is half hidden in the shadows, pressed against the wall, his teenage face young with bewilderment. And Wesley, in his chair beside the hearth, jaw set against the chinrest, eyes resolutely not on hers, not on his fiddle and the fingers that can’t play it. The worst of it is that the familiar melody is still recognizable, just close enough to right that Claire still finds herself listening for it, each wrong note jarring the ear all over again.
And he won’t quit. Tries to force it, plays faster, leaves “Over the Waterfall” behind and aims for something else, anything else. Claire almost recognizes a few measures of any of a half-dozen tunes, but the notes tumble over one another in a grating cacophony.