The Waltz Dad Wrote for Mama

Eula’s Waltz

I went to the back of the barn and took Dad’s fiddle out of its case.

I had put on my green flannel shirt that morning, the one Dad always said made me look like Mama. My hands were shaking so bad I could barely tighten the bow.

When I came back across the floor carrying the fiddle, the room went quiet. Not all at once.

It started near me and spread out, like a ripple on a pond. The guitar stopped. The banjo stopped. People who had been laughing stopped laughing.

I stood next to Dad. He looked up at me, then at the fiddle in my hands, and his face went very still.

“Happy birthday, Dad,” I said. “This is for you. And for Mama.”

I put the fiddle under my chin, right on the worn spot where his chin had rested for sixty years.

I set the bow on the string, light, like a baby bird. And I drew the first long note of Eula’s Waltz.

It was not perfect. My first note wobbled. But then the second note came true, and the third, and I left a little breath at the end of the first phrase, like Clement taught me, like I was waiting for Mama to answer.

Out on the floor, Ferrell and Fleta stood up from their hay bale. They have been married fifty five years.

They danced to Eula’s Waltz at their own wedding in 1971. Ferrell took Fleta by the hand, and they stepped out onto the floor and began to waltz.

Then another couple stood up, and another. Old men in feed store caps, and their wives in church dresses. Young couples with their babies.

In a minute, there were twenty people dancing on that floor in the afternoon light, slow, to my mother’s song.

I looked down at Dad. He was smiling.

Then he began to hum.

He hummed every note. Not one wrong. He hummed it the way he used to play it, slow, like he was talking to somebody.

His eyes were open and fixed on the fiddle under my chin, and his lips barely moved, but I could hear him under the music.

At the end of the first time through, Clement stepped up beside me with his red fiddle under his chin and came in on the second part, playing the harmony he had played behind my father for forty years.

The sound filled up that barn all the way to the rafters.