The Waltz Dad Wrote for Mama

Christmas Money

That night after supper, I told Seth. My husband works for the power co-op as a lineman. He is not a man of many words. He sat at our kitchen table and listened to the whole thing without interrupting once.

When I finished, he got up, went to the cabinet over the refrigerator, and took down the coffee can where we keep the Christmas money. He counted it out on the table. It was six hundred and ten dollars.

“The boys won’t get the four wheeler,” I said.

“The boys will live,” Seth said. “That’s your daddy’s fiddle.” He pushed the money across the table to me, and that was all he said about it.

On Friday, I walked back down to Forrest’s on my lunch hour and paid him five hundred and twenty dollars in twenties and tens.

He walked me to the door. “Your daddy played my wedding,” he said. “Nineteen seventy two. Played it for nothing because I didn’t have anything. You tell him Forrest said thank you, if he can still hear it.”

Seth met me in the parking lot after his shift. He took the case out of my hands and carried it to the car like he was carrying one of our babies home from the hospital.

He set it in the back seat and buckled the seat belt over it.

The Trouble

The trouble was that I could not play a note.

When I was eight years old, Dad tried to teach me. He sat me on a kitchen chair and put that fiddle under my chin and showed me how to hold the bow, light, like you’re holding a baby bird. I made a sound like a cat on a fence.

I cried and quit after two weeks. He never pushed. He said the fiddle would wait for me if I ever wanted it.

Now his birthday was coming in April. He would be eighty. Seth and I had already said we wanted to throw him a party in our barn, a real dance, like the old ones at the community building.

I knew who ought to play the last waltz at that dance.

Not a record. Not a cassette tape or a song on somebody’s phone. My father’s fiddle, playing my mother’s waltz, so he could hear it one more time while he could still hear anything at all.

The only problem was me.

Clement

There is exactly one man left alive in our part of the county who knew Eula’s Waltz the way my father played it. His name is Clement Thayer.

He is ninety years old, and he lives a mile and a half down the road from us in a white farmhouse with a tin roof.

Clement played second fiddle behind my father for forty years. They played every Saturday dance together, every homecoming, every funeral that wanted music.

On the second Saturday in January, a little after one in the afternoon, I put Dad’s fiddle case in the back seat and drove down to Clement’s.

The sun was out, and the frost was just burning off the pasture.

Clement opened the door before I knocked. He was wearing overalls and a flannel shirt buttoned to the neck, and his hair was white as cotton. He looked at the case in my hand for a long time.

“That’s Orval’s,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Forrest told me it was in his window.” He shook his head. “I went down there to buy it myself, but you’d beat me to it by a day.”

He let me in. His kitchen smelled like woodsmoke and coffee and rosin. He sat me down at a table covered with an oilcloth and told me to take it out of the case.

When I did, he reached over and touched the little E under the chinrest with one finger.

“What do you want with it, Erin?” he asked.

“I want to play Eula’s Waltz at his eightieth birthday,” I said. “In April. In our barn. I want him to hear it on his own fiddle.”

Clement leaned back in his chair. “Can you play anything at all?”

“No, sir. Not one note.”

He was quiet so long I thought he was going to send me home.

Then he pushed himself up out of his chair, went into the next room, and came back with his own fiddle, a red one with the varnish nearly worn off.

“Then you’ll be here every Saturday afternoon from now to April,” he said. “One o’clock. You’ll practice every day in between, an hour if you can stand it, and you won’t complain about your fingers. Is that a deal?”

“That’s a deal,” I said.

“Your daddy never hurried that waltz,” Clement said. “Not once in forty years. So we won’t hurry it either.”