The Violin Conspiracy(40)

“Okay,” Ray said. He sat back down and reached for her hand again.

He sat with her as she slept.



* * *



—

The next few weeks passed in a blur, taking turns at her bedside, and when he couldn’t be with her he sat in the hallway, staring blankly at his textbook: A History of Western Music. He played for her whenever he could—The Lark Ascending and de Falla’s Spanish Dance—always finishing with “Rhosymedre.”

Often, she’d talk, drifting in and out of consciousness. She seemed desperate to tell him as much as she could about her family, especially her grandfather, and Ray was desperate to hear—as if injecting her memories would allow her to live on.

“Whose fiddle is that?” she asked him the first morning he was back, as he opened the violin case. “You said you’d brought PopPop’s fiddle?”

“This is PopPop’s fiddle,” he said, showing it to her.

“Why isn’t it in the case? The one with the loose handle? It’s green inside.”

“You mean the alligator-skin case? It’s under my bed, at school. I just wanted something to protect PopPop’s fiddle a little better,” he explained.

“That’s good, baby. That’s real good. Sure wish you’d brought it, though.” Then she told him what she remembered about the violin—much he’d already heard, but some was new.

Her grandfather Leon had been born into slavery on a Georgia plantation outside Atlanta. She didn’t know the plantation’s name. He’d learned to play his fiddle as a child, Grandma Nora wasn’t clear how. The slaveholders, the Marks family, had come to Georgia a generation before, maybe thirty or forty years earlier, from somewhere in Italy. The Marks family had built the plantation house, bought slaves, and tried to assimilate into Southern culture.

“Is that where you learned Italian?” Ray had never put it together, but he suddenly remembered that, when he was little, his grandma would sometimes say some words in a different language.

“Yes, baby. You remember pronto? I’d say that when the pies were finished cooking. You sure loved my blueberry pie.”

“I sure did,” he said.

By the time Leon was a young man, he would play regularly for his master. “He always told us about playing after dinner and for the parties at the big house. He told me how much he loved playing at them parties.” They would dance on weekends and celebrate when the harvest was in. On Sundays after church, if the field slaves didn’t have to return to work, he played for them, too. “He knew playing that fiddle kept him and his family alive, baby.” The fiddle made him valuable.

Although it had apparently always been in the Marks family, no one had played the fiddle like Leon could. When the master was upset, Leon’s playing made him smile. When slaves were exhausted at the end of the day, his playing made them get up and dance. He could soothe crying babies and impress crowded parlors.

Grandma Nora said that Leon and his master were close. Ray wondered if the master was Leon’s biological father.

After the War Between the States, the master freed all his slaves. He gave Leon the fiddle, telling him how happy Leon’s playing had made him and his family. “That’s all PopPop had in the world when he left that plantation, baby. Just that fiddle. He played every chance he could. He played that fiddle every day. Every single day.”

Leon was very superstitious and thought his homemade rosin—his Good Luck Dust—made him a good musician and that it was bad luck to wipe it off. Grandma Nora remembered that whenever Leon picked it up, white fingerprints dusted the fiddle’s body.

The violin case had an interesting story. The slave cabins were perched on the edge of a swamp—probably to make it harder for the enslaved people to run away. Alligators lived in the swamp, sometimes eating the chickens and the goats that roamed freely around the cabins. One particularly big alligator would lurk offshore, its yellow eyes gleaming in the firelight, drifting lazily in the water until it lunged onto the bank, dragging its prey down. Three or four of the enslaved men caught and killed it—and one of them turned that skin into a fiddle case. He inlaid the case with scraps of dark green velvet brought special from Savannah for the mistress’s gown.

When Leon moved to Atlanta, he first supported himself by playing—at local parlors or at musical events, sometimes accompanying itinerant singers or other musicians. When he married Annabeth Wines, though, his days as a musician ended: he spent the next forty years working in a lumber mill. But that fiddle remained his obsession, and he played for them every night. None of his children or grandchildren had any interest in music, so after his death the fiddle sat, unused, in Nora’s home. She’d perhaps opened the case a dozen times in the next fifty years.

“He was a good man,” she told Ray. “And, oh, he would have been so proud of you! PopPop always had a kind word for everyone no matter how nasty someone treated him. He always said, ‘Respect yourself and people will respect you, too. It has to start with you, Nora.’ He’d say to me, ‘No matter how they treat you, you just remember that you’re worthy of respect.’ I can hear his voice right now, baby. ‘You’re worthy, Nora,’ he’d tell me.” She looked at Ray. “I never forgot that.”

Medicine bottles stood like sentries on top of her nightstand; Aunt Joyce, Aunt Rochelle, and Ray were the ones who memorized her medication schedule and knew when to add dolasetron to ease her nausea, or to cut back on FEC-T, the chemotherapy drug, when she complained of headaches.