Black River (12 page)

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.

“Evening, Wesley,” he'd said, as though it were just past supper and not the wee hours of the morning. “Something I can help you with?”

Wes had walked straight up to him, hadn't missed the way Farmer stepped forward to meet him, leaned a little to match his movements. Wes got just inside the barn, and he was surprised by its warmth, by how sweet the hay made it smell. “Dennis ran off,” Wes said evenly. “You ain't seen him, have you?”

“Nope. Something upset him?”

Wes shrugged. “He's a teenager.”

“Don't always seem to think real straight at that age,” Farmer agreed.

They'd stood there a few long moments more.

“I don't usually see you up this late, Arthur.” Wes was suddenly aware of the feel of the barn aisle beneath his feet, the rocks embedded in the packed dirt pressing against the soles of his boots. “Got day watch tomorrow, don't you?”

“One of my mares is colicky,” Farmer said. “Got to sit up with her.”

That's when Wes had seen him. Just when he was ready to let his suspicions go, to assume his stepson was lying low out in the pasture, Dennis had let his curiosity get the better of him. Wes spotted his face peering out from the open doorway of one of the stalls, the barn lights casting a mocking halo on his glossy child's hair before he ducked back inside.

Farmer saw Wes see Dennis. Wes knew he had. Farmer's gaze had been set on Wes's face; he'd have seen his eyes dart away, seen the twitch at his jaw.

“Well,” Wes said carefully, “you give me a call if you see him, all right?”

“Will do,” Farmer agreed. Lied right to him, blue eyes innocent as could be. Like he already knew Wes wasn't gonna call him on it.

Lord only knew what Dennis had told him. Maybe nothing, maybe it'd all been assumptions on Farmer's part. Thought he was hitting Dennis, Wes supposed, treating him bad. Black River had its share of wife- and child-beaters, most of whom were repentant come morning. Not everyone could leave it at the gate, and some of those who took it home didn't know what to do with it when they got there. (Lane's wives left him for good reason.) Wes, though, had never lost control. Not ever. Not even in those first weeks back at work after the riot, when every other CO in the prison, Farmer included, would've looked the other way if Wes had decided to take out his frustrations on the inmates now and then. Folks almost expected it of him, as though he was beholden to some kind of equation that stated being hurt meant he was gonna turn right around and hurt someone else. But Wes, though he'd had plenty of anger, plenty of rage, had never laid a hand on anyone, Dennis included. Not till years later, till that last night with the gun. But there was a reason Wes didn't challenge Farmer that night in the barn, though it was the first time Wes recognized one of Farmer's lies, the first time he saw how easily they came to him. The anger that had been kindled in Wes with the riot hadn't begun to lessen with time the way he had first thought it would. It lived in him like a chronic disease, like a cancer, multiplying, growing, coursing through every part of him. Better, maybe, that Dennis was out of reach just then.