My parents had gone to church, but there was on that winter’s day some problem with the stove there. Smoke had filled the nave at the start of Mass and everyone was sent straight home. So my mother and father arrived when I was deep into my playing. They listened, standing at the door rooted by the surprise of what they heard, for how long I do not know. I had not heard the door open and with my eyes shut not seen the light thereby admitted. I finally noticed the cold breeze that swirled around them, turned, and we stared at one another with a shocked gravity that my father broke at last by asking, “How long?”
I did not answer, though I wanted to. Seven years. Seven years!
He led my mother in. They shut the door behind them. Then he said, in a voice of troubled softness, “Keep on.”
So I did play, and when I quit he said nothing.
Discovered, I thought the worst was over. I put the fiddle away that night. But next morning, waking to a silence where I usually heard my father’s noises, hearing a vacancy of presence before I even knew it for sure, I knew the worst was yet to come. My playing woke something in him. That’s what I think. That was the reason he left. But I don’t know why he had to take the violin. When I opened the blanket box and saw that it was missing, all breath left me, all thought, all feeling. For months after that I was the same as my mother. In our loss, we were cut off from all the true, bright, normal routines of living. I might have stayed that way, gone even deeper into the silence, joined my mother on the dark bench from which she could not return. I would have lived on in that diminished form except that I had a dream.
The dream was simple. A voice. Go to the lake and sit by the southern rock. Wait there. I will come.
I decided to follow these direct orders. I took my bedroll and a scrap of jerky, a loaf of bannock, and sat myself down on the scabby gray lichen of the southern rock. That plate of stone jutted out into the water, which dropped off deeply from its edges into a green-black depth. From that rock, I could see all that happened on the water. I put tobacco down for the spirits. All day, I sat there waiting. Flies bit me. The wind boomed in my ears. Nothing happened. I curled up when the light left and I slept. Stayed on the next morning. As a matter of fact, the next day too. It was the first time I had ever slept out on the shores, and I began to understand why people said of the lake there is no end to it, when of course, as I always thought, it was bounded by rocks. But there were rivers flowing in and flowing out, secret currents, six kinds of weather working on its surface and a hidden terrain underneath. Each wave washed in from somewhere unseen and washed right out again to go somewhere unknown. I saw birds, strange-feathered and unfamiliar, passing through on their way to somewhere else. Listening to the water, another music, I was for the first time comforted by sounds other than my fiddle playing. I let go. I nibbled the bannock, drank the lake water, rolled in my blanket. I saw three dawns and for three nights I watched the stars take their positions in the crackling black heavens. I thought I might just stay there forever, staring at the blue thread of the horizon. Nothing mattered. When a small bit of the horizon’s thread detached, darkened, proceeded forward slowly, I observed it with only mild interest. The speck seemed both to advance and retreat. It wavered back and forth. I lost sight of it for long stretches, then it popped closer, over a wave.
It was a canoe. But either the paddler was asleep in the bottom, or the canoe was drifting. As it came nearer, I decided for sure it must be adrift. It rode so light in the waves, nosing this way, then the other. Always, no matter how hesitant or contradictory, it ended up advancing straight toward the southern rock and straight toward me. I watched until I could clearly see there was nobody in it before I recalled why I had come to that place. Then the words of my dream returned. I will come to you. I dove in eagerly, swam for the canoe — this arm does not prevent that. I have learned, as boys do, to compensate and although my stroke was peculiar I was strong. I thought perhaps the canoe had been badly tied and slipped its mooring, but no rope trailed. The canoe had lost its paddler somehow, gotten away from its master. Perhaps high waves had coaxed it off a beach where its owner had dragged it up, thinking it safe. I somehow pushed the canoe ashore, then pulled it up behind me, wedged it in a cleft between two rocks. Only then did I look inside, at the gear it held. There, lashed to a crosspiece in the bow, was a black case of womanly shape that fastened on the side with two brass locks.
That is how my fiddle came to me, said Shamengwa, raising his head to look steadily at me. He smiled, shook his fine head and spoke softly. And that is why no other fiddle will I play.
Silent Passage
CORWIN SHUT THE door to the room in the basement where his mother’s boyfriend was letting him stay, temporarily. Standing on a door propped on sawhorses, he pushed his outspread fingers against the foam panel of the false ceiling. He placed the panel to one side and groped up behind it among wires and underneath a pad of yellow fiberglass insulation, until he located the handle of the carrying case. Corwin dragged it toward him, overhead, bit by bit until he could tip the case and instrument through the hole into his arms. He bore it down, off the unstable, hollow-core door, to the piece of foam rubber that served as his mattress and through which, every night, he felt the hard cold of the concrete floor seep into his legs. He had taken the old man’s fiddle because he needed money, but he hadn’t thought much about where he would sell it. Who would buy it. Then he had an inspiration. He’d hitch down to Fargo with the fiddle. He’d get out at West Acres Mall and he’d bring the violin there in its case and sell it to a music lover.
Corwin got out of the car and carried the violin into the mall. In his own mind, he liked to quote himself. There are two kinds of people — the givers and the takers. I’m a taker. Render unto Corwin what is due him. His favorite movie of recent times was about a cop with a twisted way of looking at the world so you couldn’t tell if he was evil or good you only knew that he could seize your mind up with language. Corwin had a thing for language. He inhaled it from movies and rock lyrics, television. It rubbed around inside him, word against word. He thought he was writing poems sometimes in his thoughts, but the poems would not come out of his hands. The words stuck in odd configurations and made patterns that raced across the screen of his shut eyes and off the edge, down his temples into the darkness of his neck. So when he walked through the air-lock doors into the warm cathedral space of the central food court, his brain was a mumble of intentions.
He was very proud of his leather jacket which had most of what he owned inside of it, in the inner pockets. And as always he was hyperaware of his own good looks. People treated him like a good-looking person. Others, who knew him well or whom he had burned, avoided him. But this problem was nothing he could fix now. The only way, he imagined, to redeem himself was through impressing people on a level he had not yet reached. He fantasized. As a rock star, the subject of a Rolling Stone interview. Who was the real Corwin Peace? Now, taking a seat in the central court, peering at the distracted-looking customers, he understood that none of them was going to outright buy the fiddle. He got up and walked into a music store and tried to show the instrument to the manager, who only said, “Nah, we don’t take used.” Corwin walked out again. He tried a few people. They shied away or turned him down flat.