Black River

by S. M. Hulse

  At Harvest they were always the final act, got an hour where the other bands had twenty minutes. They’d play their usual set: upbeat songs people knew, or that sounded close enough to ones they did; maybe a few of those old cowboy ballads Lane liked, the ones that showed off his voice but tested the audience’s patience for pathos. And all those songs were good, but what they really did was give everyone time to wrap up whatever else they might be doing, to make their way over to the stage. Because Wes had played here every year since “Devil’s Dream,” and folks knew what was coming. Lane and Farmer would step back, and Wes would step forward. And that stage belonged to him alone.

  He had a repertoire of tunes that numbered in the hundreds, all learned by ear, all held there in his head, ready to be brought forth by his fingers at a moment’s notice. A nearly endless stable of notes and melodies at his command, and even that wasn’t enough. He composed his own tunes sometimes, pieces that went beyond improvisation, beyond a hot lick or a fast break. He never set out to do it; the tunes came into being as he played alone, forming themselves from notes that joined together almost without his deciding to join them. One of those tunes, especially, Wes let himself be proud of. It was a slow piece, not what you’d think folks would want to hear at what was essentially a big party. Not quite a waltz. More an air.

  Low notes first, building to a melody that rose into the highest register, then broke back down into the low notes again. Back and forth. Lingering on hope, never escaping melancholy. It was a piece that had evolved over the years, started as a simple thing with an A part and a B part, each repeated once. He’d built it into something more over time, found that he never played it precisely the same way twice. He added ornaments, took them away again. Experimented with double-stops, added new parts, shifted keys in the middle. To this day, he didn’t know its final form, didn’t know how it would sound if he could play it now—if he could have played it for Claire when she asked—and that, more than anything else, was why he would never forgive Williams.

  Always there was a moment toward the end of the tune, a long single high note Wes could hold seamlessly for several bow strokes, the string pressing sharp against his fingertip, his wrist fluttering in the slightest of vibratos, when he knew that everyone at Harvest was listening to him. He’d look out across the field and see them watching, from the stage all the way to the glittering river. No talking. No laughing. No drinking. Hundreds of faces, all turned his way, all listening to the music he made, all knowing there was something true in that wistful note, that even in the midst of the festival there were things here, in this canyon, in these lives, that were always painful and sometimes beautiful.

  The moment didn’t last long. The note had to end—though sometimes Wes wondered if he might sustain it forever—and when it ended people drifted out of the collective pause. By the time Wes took his fiddle from beneath his chin and nodded his head in an awkward bow, all was back to the way it had been three minutes earlier.

  And afterward, one day, there had been Claire, shy; Dennis, a dark-haired four-year-old clutching her hand; and Farmer, a sure smile on his lips and in his eyes as he introduced them. You play beautifully, Claire had said, and though Wes had heard the words from many others, many times, they’d never before brought a flush to his cheeks. That song, she said. The one you played alone. What’s it called?

  Hasn’t got a name.

  She hadn’t even had to think about it. You should call it “Black River,” she told him.

  Wes applauded with everyone else as the bluegrass band took their bows and left the stage. There was a general exchange of people in the audience while cords and microphones were rearranged, as some folks drifted away and others came to find seats and settle in. A group of teenagers claimed the straw bales in front of Wes, and they folded their gangly limbs and leaned into each other as they sat. Eighteen years working security at a shopping mall had left Wes with an earned dislike of teenagers in packs, and he thought about moving, but then Farmer walked onto the stage, Scott trailing him. One of the girls on the straw bale giggled loudly and whispered something to the boy beside her. Up on the stage, Farmer settled onto a stool near the back, out of the way. He’d dressed up; his jeans had a crease down the front, and the pearl snaps on his shirt shone in the sun. Scott had made no such concession to the occasion. He wore skinny black jeans and a plain black T-shirt. Red sleeves reached from the base of his fingers to his elbows; they looked like socks with the feet cut off. Scott’s eyebrow piercings glinted, and his dyed hair was in such disarray he might’ve just gotten out of bed, though Wes supposed he’d actually worked to make it look like that. He approached the microphone with his customary sulking shuffle. He didn’t introduce himself, didn’t speak at all, just looked back at Farmer once and sang his first note as Farmer played his first chord.

  His voice was startling. It was the clearest of tenors, nothing like his shambling speaking voice, and he hit each note so roundly, with such ease, that it seemed his range might be limitless. Scott hadn’t lied: he was a singer all right. The song he chose was just as surprising as his voice. “Mary Morgan.” It was one of those old campfire ballads with a misleading tempo, so when the tragic twist came it was a surprise that seemed either improbable or inevitable, depending on one’s mood and disposition. It told the tale of a rancher’s daughter who falls in love with a young man who has joined a roving band of horse thieves. Her father forbids her to see the horse thief, but she steals away in the middle of the night to meet him. When she returns, long past midnight, the rancher hears her in the barn and, in the dim moonlight, mistakes her for the horse thief. He gets his rifle and fires, not realizing he has taken his own daughter’s life.

  Scott really sold it, made you think it’d happened here, and not so long ago. When he sang the chorus—Wait for me beneath the willow, my Mary Morgan—it might have been with the voice of the grief-stricken young horse thief. It was, Wes realized, the first time he’d seen the kid express emotion that went beyond sullenness and anger. His audience wasn’t rapt, though. Wasn’t even polite. The whispering had started soon as Scott stepped onto the stage, and it hadn’t quit. Folks clearly knew who Scott was—and who his father was, or where he was, at least. In front of Wes, two of the teenage girls were sharing a pair of earphones, their heads touching; he could hear the thrum of the bass from where he stood. One of the girls had blond hair, blond as Claire’s had been, and he wondered briefly if Scott knew her, if he thought she was pretty.

  Onstage, Farmer played calmly, purposefully, keeping out of the way of Scott’s voice. Scott grasped the microphone in both hands and kept his eyes cast down, never looking at his audience. Wes closed his own eyes and listened as Scott started the final chorus. Wait for me . . . His voice soared, and Wes felt it deep in his chest and recognized what had once been his, this thing for which music was such an inadequate word. This magic, this enchantment, this prayer. It went beyond talent, Wes decided. He believed in gifts, and this, what Scott had, this was a gift.

  The applause was halfhearted, and Scott didn’t wait to acknowledge it; he was off the stage before it died down, which was quickly enough. One of the boys on the straw bale laughed, a braying guffaw, and said, “God, what a fucking faggot.”

  Wes found Scott out behind the craft booths, next to the river. The boy was sitting on the ground against a large rock, an untouched candy apple in one hand. He spun the stick and stared intently at the red candy gloss, as though it might show him visions.

  “Hey,” Wes said, and Scott looked up.

  “I didn’t know you were here,” he said.

  “I used to fiddle here,” Wes told him. “When I was younger.”

  “This whole thing’s pretty lame.” He picked a shard of nut off the sticky surface of the apple.

  Almost made Wes angry, but if he’d had the reception Scott did, maybe he’d have felt the same. “Don’t think I’ve ever heard a kid your age sing so good,” Wes told him. He didn’t offer praise lightly
, and maybe the kid sensed that, because the pale skin on his neck flushed.

  “I told you I could.”

  “I guess you did.”

  “Mr. Farmer helped me pick the song. I’d never heard of it.”

  “It’s a good one. You did it justice.”

  “He said he used to play with you.” Scott glanced once at Wes’s hands, then away again.

  “That’s right.”

  “You know he was a prison guard?”

  “Yeah.” Wes eased himself to the ground beside Scott, held a hand to his forehead to shield his eyes from the sun, already low over the mountains. This time of year it just skimmed the sky. “Lots of folks around here are.”

  “I was kind of surprised when Dennis told me.” Scott turned, but his eyes were shadowed. The mountainside behind him, across the water, was covered in ponderosa pine and western larch. The needles of the larches had gone fiery yellow, and it looked like half the trees on the slope had started to burn from within. “I mean, he seems like a pretty decent guy.”

  “He is. I known him a long time.” Behind them, in one of the craft booths, a woman laughed loudly, a shrill false sound. Tell him, Wes thought. Wouldn’t be so hard. I was a CO, too.

  “Most of those people are real assholes, though.” Scott dropped the candy apple on the grass. “You should hear the stuff my dad says goes on in there.”

  The scent of fried food was starting to make Wes queasy, like it used to at the mall. Tell him. “Scott,” he said, “did you mean what you said in the truck the other day? About wanting to learn to play the fiddle?”

  Scott turned to look at him, and the breeze lifted his hair at the crown of his head. Looked a little like bird feathers. Delicate. “I guess so.”

  “’Cause I was thinking about that, and if you’re interested—serious about it, I mean—I could teach you.”

  “For real?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow. I mean, that would be awesome.”

  Wes stood, and Scott quickly followed suit, brushing dried grass from the seat of his jeans. “Don’t waste my time if you ain’t gonna stick with it,” Wes said.

  “I don’t quit stuff.”

  “All right. You work with Dennis on Saturdays, right? Can you hang around an hour after he’s done with you?”

  “Sure.” An anguished expression abruptly crossed his face. “I don’t have one, though. A fiddle.”

  Wes gazed past him, toward the dark water. Moved so fast, but didn’t look it from here. “I got one you can use to start.”

  Wes’s father had loved the fiddle. The violin. The sounds made by four strings and hollow wood. He played old-time music mostly, but he also knew Irish tunes, and Scottish, even a few Cajun and Gypsy. He knew the history of each tune, the odd stories and anecdotes that clung to folk music like burrs. He read books about music, slowly, the strip of leather he used as a bookmark making its way through each volume just a few pages at a time: theory texts, biographies of Paganini and Heifetz, histories of classical and folk music alike. On the third Saturday of each month, he took Wes’s mother into Elk Fork to hear the symphony. He believed the Chaconne from Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor for unaccompanied violin was the world’s only perfect work of art, and he listened to it every morning, a daily devotional, the way other men studied Bible verses or snapped out two dozen pushups.

  He’d had talent, his father, but mostly he’d had a well-matched combination of passion and work ethic. Wes hadn’t realized it until years after his father’s death, but his father must have understood that his skills would never match his desires. He would never receive the praise of an audience of strangers. He would be shackled always to notes composed by others, and even then there would be strict limits; Bach’s Chaconne would remain forever out of reach.

  Wes always imagined this realization as an epiphany, and it is at this moment, in his constructed memory, that his father turns his attention to lutherie. He built the shed out beside the house, just beyond the first line of pines, and he furnished it slowly. Wes was ten, eleven. He remembered the room filling gradually: a workbench first, largely empty. Tools appearing one by one. Full-size color posters of revered Italian violins, with drawings and charts and measurements on the reverse. Paper-and-pencil sketches of scrolls, f-holes, corner blocks and purfling. Battered old violins from which his father stripped the varnish or pried the tops. And, eventually, pale, perfect blocks of white maple and spruce, narrow strips of ebony and pear. Curls of wood scattered like dry leaves across the floor.

  The violin his father chose as his model was a Guarneri del Gesù, not as sweet as most Stradivaris, but more powerful. One instrument. He built it slowly, over the course of a year. The scroll was rough, and the corners were sharper, the f-holes canted more steeply than in most fiddles. The varnish was light, more yellow than red, a color many people wouldn’t—didn’t—like, but that showed off the fine grain of the wood beneath. Plain ebony pegs, an ebony tailpiece with a mother-of-pearl Parisian eye set into the center, four silver fine tuners.

  Wes hadn’t found it until three weeks after his father’s funeral. He’d gone into the shed intending to pack up the tools, because his mother wouldn’t or couldn’t, and the fiddle had been hanging from a wire above his father’s neat, bare workbench. It was already set up, and when Wes took it down from the wire he found the strings still bright and unblemished by rosin, though they were flat in different intervals (three days would pass before Wes could bring himself to turn the pegs his father had last touched). There was a label inside, visible through the left f-hole. The year—1966—and, where another luthier would have inscribed his name, Jeremiah Carver had written only For my son.

  Wes ate at Farmer’s that night. The older man had corralled him into it at Harvest. Wes’s first instinct had been to decline, but the thought of another meal alone with Dennis, at that damned table, persuaded him.

  Farmer emerged from one of the barns when Wes arrived at half past six. “You’ll have to forgive me,” he said, gesturing at his oil-stained shirt. “My irrigation pump quit again. Third time in two months. Been trying to get it going.”

  “Place has grown,” Wes noted.

  Farmer grinned. “Yeah. I’ve got a good stud and some nice mares. I breed a few colts every year and sell ’em. Keeps me busy.”

  “Well, it sure looks good.”

  Farmer took the compliment with his usual grace, then said, “I’ll get the grill going soon as I change. You want a beer?”

  “Sure.”

  Wes sat on the yellow farmhouse’s small porch and looked out at all Farmer had built here. The horses had been a hobby when he was working at the prison, but Wes saw it had become far more than that since. A hell of a thing, especially considering Farmer was living on his pension from the prison. Did thirty-five years there. He had always been one of those COs who knew how to leave it at the gate. Back when they were both on the main cellblock, Wes would sometimes see Farmer at work and then see him at home the same day, and it was like talking to two different men. Farmer the CO was good at his job, serious and alert but able to walk the fine line between authority and rigidity. He kept his dignity no matter what the inmates threw at him—even when it was their own shit—and as he moved up the ranks, he earned and retained the respect of everyone who worked with him or under him. Farmer the horseman and husband, on the other hand, changed in the locker room in a town where most COs wore their uniforms home. He had a gentle manner and sense of humor, believed that God heard prayers, and, Wes suspected, never stopped thinking about the wife he’d accidentally killed on a lonely highway all those years ago.

  The sun was sinking toward the tops of the mountains to the west, and Wes let his gaze follow it down to the land that used to be his. The house was barely visible, just slices of white through the pine. As he watched, a horse and rider appeared on the other side of the far pasture fence. A black horse with white forelegs, a bareheaded rider who sat straight in the saddle. The pair stopped
near the end of the fence, and the rider rested his hands on the horn of the saddle, let the horse lower his head to graze. When he made the effort, Wes could hear the clink of some piece of metal on the tack. He wondered if Dennis could recognize him from that distance.

  “All right,” Farmer said, stepping back onto the porch and handing Wes a frosty bottle. “I got plenty more where these came from.”

  “Thanks.” Wes glanced back across the pasture, but Dennis was gone.

  “You’re looking awfully pensive,” Farmer ventured. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “Try me.”

  He almost lied. Said Music, or The time we got drunk after Harvest and Lane woke up on your roof, or even Claire, because that, at least, was always partly true. He took a long pull on the bottle. “I was thinking about that night I came here looking for Dennis.”

  Farmer’s jaw tightened, and Wes resisted the satisfaction he felt in his gut.

  Three months after the riot. The first time Dennis ran off, the first of many. (Claire never knew, thought the first time he disappeared was two months later.) He was fourteen. Way past midnight, Wes had woken to the sound of the front door shutting, and he’d gotten outside in time to make out Dennis’s skinny form shimmying under the hot wire around the broodmare pasture. Claire was still asleep, and Wes was careful not to wake her while he dressed. He’d driven down the narrow access lane between their place and Farmer’s, only to find Farmer himself standing in the doorway of his barn when he got there.