I don’t believe my mother meant things to change so, but she and my father had lost everything once already, and this sorrow she bore was beyond her strength. As though her heart was buried underneath that stone as well, she turned cold, turned away from the rest of us, lost her feelings. Now that I am old and know the ways of grief I understand she felt too much, loved too hard, and was afraid to lose us as she had lost my brother. But to a little boy these things are hidden. It only seemed to me that along with that baby I had lost her love. Her strong arms, her kisses, the clean-soap smell of her face, her voice calming me, all of this was gone. She was like a statue in a church. Every so often we would find her in the kitchen, standing still, staring through the wall. At first we touched her clothes, petted her hands. My father kissed her, spoke gently into her ear, combed her short hair — she was a full-blood and in the traditional way had cut off her hair in mourning. It made a fat bush around her head. Later, after we had given up, we just walked around her as you would a stump. Our oldest, my half brother, came and visited. He took my brother away with him to serve at Holy Mass. The house went quiet, my sister took up the cooking, my father became a silent, empty ear, and gradually we accepted that the lively, loving mother we had known wasn’t going to return. If she wanted to sit in the dark all day, we let her. We didn’t try and coax her out. More often, she spent her time at the church. She attended morning Mass and stayed on, her ivory and silver rosary draped in her right fist, her left hand wearing the beads smoother, smaller, until I thought for sure they would disappear between her fingers.
Just after the great visitation of doves, we heard that Seraph had run away. While the rest of the family went to church to pray for his return, one day, I became restless. I wished that I could run away too. I’d been left home with a cold and my sister had instructed me to keep the stove hot — I wasn’t really all that sick but had produced a dreadful, gravelly cough to fool my sister into letting me skip church. I began to poke around, and soon enough I came across the fiddle that my mother had forced my father to stop playing. So there it was. I was alone with it. I was now five or six years old, but I could balance a fiddle and before all of this I had seen my father use the bow. That day, I got sound out of it all right, but nothing satisfactory. Still, the noise made my bones shiver. I put the fiddle back carefully, well before they came home, and climbed underneath the blankets when they walked into the yard. I pretended to sleep, not because I wanted so badly to keep up the appearance of being sick, but because I could not bear to return to the way things were. Something had happened. Something had changed. Something had disrupted the nature of all that I knew. You might think it had to do with my brother running away. But no. This deep thing had to do with the fiddle.
Freedom, I found, is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands. After that day, I contrived, as often as I could, to stay alone in the house. As soon as everyone was gone I took the fiddle from its hidden place beneath the blankets in the blanket chest, and I tuned it to my own liking. I learned how to play it one note at a time, not that I had a name for each distinct sound. I started to fit these sounds together. The string of notes that I made itched my brain. It became a torment for me to have to put away the fiddle when my parents or my sister came home. Sometimes, if the wind was right, I sneaked the fiddle from the house even if they were home and I played out in the woods. I was always careful that the wind should carry my music away to the west, the emptiness, where there was no one to hear it. But one day the wind might have shifted. Or perhaps my mother’s ears were more sensitive than either my sister’s or my father’s. Because when I had come back into the house, I found her staring out the window, to the west. She was excited, breathing fast. Did you hear it? She cried out. Did you hear it? Terrified to be discovered, I said no. She was very agitated and my father had a hard time to calm her. After he finally had her asleep, he sat an hour at the table with his head in his hands. I tiptoed around the house, did the chores. I felt terrible not to tell him that my music was the source of what she heard. Even then, though I would not have understood all that my father despaired of, sitting there in the lamplight with his head in his hands, I did know that it had to do with my mother and my secret music and that my father thought she heard something she had not. I did know it would have helped him had I admitted the truth. But now, as I look back, I consider my silence the first decision I made as a true musician. An artist. That I must play was more important to me than my father’s pain. I said nothing, but was all the more sly and twice as secretive.
It was a question of survival, after all. If I had not found the music, I would have died of the silence. The rule of quiet in the house became more rigorous and soon my sister fled to the government boarding school. But I was still a child, and if my mother and father sat for hours uttering no word, and required me to do the same, where else was my mind to take itself but music? I saved myself by inventing songs and playing them inside my mind where my parents could not hear them. I made up notes that were not music, exactly, but the pure emotions of my childish heart. As of yet, nobody had thought of school. The stillness in my mother had infected my father. There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.
We had two cows and I did the milking in the morning and evening. Lucky, because if my parents forgot to cook at least I had the milk. Sometimes I made my supper on a half a warm, foamy bucket. Maybe a little bannock to soften in the milk and chew. I can’t say I really ever suffered from a stomach kind of hunger, but another kind of human hunger bit me. I was lonely. It was about that time I received a terrible kick from the cow, an accident, as she was usually mild. A wasp sting, perhaps, caused her to lash out in surprise. She caught my arm, and although I had no way to know it, shattered the bone. Painful? Oh, for certain it was, I remember, but my parents did not think to take me to a doctor. They did not notice, I suppose. I did tell my father about it, but he only nodded, pretending that he had heard, and went back to whatever he was doing.
The pain in my arm kept me awake, and I know that at night, when I couldn’t distract myself, I moaned in my blankets by the stove. But worse was the uselessness of the arm in playing the fiddle. I tried to prop it up, but it fell like a rag-doll arm. I finally hit upon the solution, a strip of cloth, that I have used ever since. I started tying up my broken arm at that early age, just as I do now. I had of course no idea that it would heal that way and that as a result I would be considered a permanent cripple. I only knew that with the arm securely tied up I could play, and that I could play saved my life. So I was, like most artists, deformed by my art. I was shaped.
There was bound to come a time when I slipped up, but it didn’t come for a while, and by the time it did I was already twelve years old. My father, my mother, and I had gotten used to our strangeness by then. I went to school because the truancy agent finally came and got me. School is where I got the name I carry now. The full-blood children gave it to me as a kind of blessing, I think. Shamengwa, the black and orange butterfly. It was an acceptance of my “wing arm.” Yet, even though a nun told me that a picture of a butterfly in a painting of our lady was meant to represent the Holy Spirit, I didn’t like the name at first. But I was too quiet to do anything about it. My bashfulness about the shape of my arm caused me to avoid people even once I was older, and I made no friends. Human friends. My true friend was hidden in the blanket chest, anyway, the only friend I really needed. And then I lost that friend.