Reacquaintance
Your thick knuckles, hard like knotted oak, colors of blood stain, winter dusk, rusting iron, field dirt, and old coffee, swollen with the sap of sweet and bitter memories; bone snapping frost and summer fever heat, some seventy odd years of silent toil in distant fields scraping long furrows behind a mule, then sitting on a tractor in years when things got easier, followed by times of bank trouble, worry and more worry when the years got hard again.
Nights when you were young you would take out this fiddle. Its wood was old then and dark and red deep in the grain lying season upon season, the turning of years, the turning of the ground. Your old hands seem to match it now, have caught up with it in age some. But the music. The old tunes. Probably long time gone. The sap of memory dried solid and silent.
The tips of your fingers — smashed thick and flat like spades from mishaps with wagon axles, thresher belts, hammers, and heavy beams — slide along the case, find the clasp, pop it open as on hundreds of nights when the fire had burnt low, the dinner dishes put away, the crickets calling you to join in their symphony. Your hand caresses the slim neck as you lift the instrument from its case; weighing barely more than a cigar box, shaped womanly with graceful curves and fine sudden shifts of direction perfectly accented; everything light, in balance, rounded and resonant. The fine parallel black lines tracing around the edge; ebony tuning pegs smooth as polished bone, formed like elegant perfume bottle stoppers; the scroll unfurling like forest fern; the short finger board a devil’s dance floor with its mysteries of invisible notes. You set the fiddle down on the table where it balances like a babe’s cradle. Your hand goes to the bow, twists the holding clasp and pulls it from the case. It is light and thin as the wisp of a Spring branch scoring arcs in the breeze. The horse hair is old and worn, needing replacement, as do the tired strings. But your purpose is not to play this night, but to touch and caress and remember.
Your blunt fingers twist the screw at the end of the bow and the horse hair begins to grow taut, the gentle curve of the bow lifting just a pencil’s width away from the hair. You settle the fiddle between your collar bone and chin with your grizzled gray beard draping over the wide bottom like a quilt upon the foot of a bed. You draw the bow across the first, thinest string, while your left hand turns the peg, pulling the string tight, tighter, more, and still more until it sings the note that sounds right to you from a memory now reawakening, the sap beginning to flow. And on to the next string, and the next, each peg loosening its wooden bite to pull the string’s voice into harmony with the others. But they are tired, reluctant, and let go their pitch; You keep twisting at the pegs, coaxing the strings to awaken and sing together.
When your bow draws sounds that are bold and sweet, the fiddle comes out from under the blanket of your beard and you set it on the table once more with the bow beside it. Then you sit in your chair next to the table and look at the fire. From far off in the distance you hear feet on floor boards with sweet high rhythmic music floating above. While you close your eyes and listen, your old hands, resting in your lap, twitch, tuck, and lift as the fiddle and bow dance together in the dimming light of the fire and the day.
