The Waltz Dad Wrote for Mama

The Long Winter

I was not a natural. I was thirty seven, with a full time job and two boys, trying to learn the fiddle from scratch in thirteen weeks.

For the first month, Clement did not let me near the waltz. He made me play long, slow notes on open strings until my arm burned.

My fingertips bled the second week. I wrapped them in medical tape from the pharmacy and kept going. Clement looked at the tape one Saturday and nodded, like that was the first thing I had done right.

I practiced in the barn, because the boys could not stand the sound in the house.

Every evening after work, in that last hour of daylight, I stood out there among the hay bales and played scales to the cows. The cows did not like it either.

Seth never said a word against it. Some nights he came out and sat on an overturned bucket and listened. Once, in February, he said, “That one almost sounded like something.” From Seth, that is a standing ovation.

In the middle of February, Clement finally taught me the first part of the waltz. He played it once, slow, on his red fiddle. Then he played it again, slower. Then he put his fiddle down and closed his eyes.

“Your daddy played it like he was talking to her,” he said. “Not performing it. Talking. Each phrase is a sentence. You leave a little breath at the end of every one, like you’re waiting for her to answer.”

Sundays

On Sundays after church, I drove to the memory care place to see Dad. I never took the fiddle.

I wanted the first time he heard it to be at his birthday, played right, not scratched out badly in a little room that smelled like disinfectant.

Some Sundays, he knew me. He would light up when I walked in and say, “There’s my girl,” and ask about the boys by name.

Some Sundays, he didn’t. He would look at me politely, like I was a nurse he had not met yet.

And some Sundays he called me Eula. The first time it happened, I nearly corrected him. Then I just let him.

“You look tired, Eula,” he said to me one Sunday in March. “You working too hard?”

“A little,” I said. My fingers were taped under my sweater sleeves.

“You ought to rest,” he said, and patted my hand. “You always did work too hard.”

There was an aide on his hall named Effie, a big cheerful girl about twenty five.

She told me that some afternoons, when the radio played anything with a fiddle in it, Dad’s left hand would start moving on the arm of his chair. Fingering notes, she said, like he was playing along.

“He doesn’t know he’s doing it,” Effie said. “But the hand knows.”

I sat in my car in the parking lot after that and cried for ten minutes. Then I drove home and practiced for an hour and a half.