The Waltz Dad Wrote for Mama

When Dad Stood Up

Halfway through the second time around, Dad put both hands on the arms of his chair.

Effie started toward him. I heard a chair scrape back across the barn, too, and I knew without looking that it was Darla, because her whole body had been listening for him to fall for three years.

Dad pushed himself up out of the chair. It took him two tries. His knees shook.

But he stood all the way up, in his white shirt and his bolo tie, and he took one step toward me, and then another.

Dad came up behind me. He put his left hand on my shoulder, the way he used to when I was eight.

Then he reached his right hand around and laid his fingers on my bow arm, just above the wrist.

His fingers moved. Light. Pressing and lifting, pressing and lifting, in time with the bow. Telling me where to lean in. Telling me where to ease off.

He was not holding me up. He was playing. He was playing through me, the way he had tried to teach me thirty years before.

“Loose wrist, sister,” he said in my ear. That was what he called me when I was little. Sister. Nobody had called me that since I was ten. “Loose. Let her sing.”

I let her sing. I don’t know how I kept playing. Tears were running down my face and off my chin onto the fiddle, onto the worn spot, and I kept playing because his fingers were telling me to.

Across the floor, Darla had stopped. She was standing about ten feet away, in the middle of the dancers, with her hands pressed against her mouth. She had come to catch him if he fell. He did not fall.

The whole barn was watching her now. Every one of those hundred people.

Watching her stand there in the middle of the floor, watching my father stand up on his own legs for the first time in a month to put his fingers on the bow of the fiddle she had pawned for four hundred dollars.

She did not look away. She did not go back to her chair. She stood in the middle of that floor and let every one of them look at her, and she watched my father, and she cried.

The Last Note

We came to the end of the waltz. I held the last note as long as I had bow. Clement held his under mine.

And then it was quiet, and the only sound in the whole barn was a calf bawling out in the pasture and somebody sniffling near the door.

Dad took his fingers off my arm. He patted my shoulder twice. Then he looked over at Clement and said, clear as day, “That’s Eula’s.”

“That’s Eula’s, Orval,” Clement said. His voice broke on it.

Dad turned around. He looked at the room full of people who had danced to him for sixty years. He looked at Ferrell and Fleta, still holding hands in the middle of the floor. And then he looked at Darla.

“Darla,” he said. “Did you hear my girl?”

He knew her. On that day, in that minute, he knew her. And he knew me. I don’t know how.

Effie said afterward that sometimes music opens a door for a little while. I don’t care how. He knew us both.

Darla came the rest of the way across the floor. She took his arm and helped him back to his chair, and she knelt down in front of him on her bad knee, on the barn floor boards, and held both his hands.

“I heard her, Orval,” she said. “I heard her.”

Then she stood up, with Seth’s hand under her elbow, and she turned around and faced me. And with a hundred people listening and not one of them making a sound, she said it.

“I’m the one who pawned it, Erin. Everybody here knows it already, so I’ll say it myself. I took his fiddle down to Forrest’s and I never came back for it. I should have called you. I should have come to you before I ever walked in that door.”

Nobody said anything. I could feel all of them waiting on me. I could feel them wanting me to say something hard to her, and I had been carrying something hard to say to her all winter.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “You should have.”

That was all I said. She had said it herself, in front of all of them, and that was harder than anything I could have said to her.

She nodded. She wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I didn’t know you could play,” she said.

“I couldn’t,” I said. “Clement taught me. Every Saturday since January.”